Media experts offered distorted
profile
Speculation may have hindered case
By PAUL FARHI and LINTON WEEKS
The Washington PostWASHINGTON - Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It wasn't, apparently, the work of al-Qaida operatives. It wasn't an angry young white man working alone. It wasn't someone who lived in Montgomery County, Md.
Almost everything the sniper "profilers" and pundits told the media over the past three weeks turns out to have been off the mark, considering the very real profiles of the two people arrested early yesterday. The men and women who had been described on the air and in print as "forensic psychologists" and "former FBI investigators" took many swings at the who and why of the sniper case - and mostly missed.
The pair taken into custody in connection with the case yesterday turn out to be John Allen Muhammad, a 41-year-old black man, a Persian Gulf War veteran and unemployed drifter, and Lee Malvo, 17, a high school student and Jamaican citizen.
That's not the profile viewers and readers would have expected.
"There's probably two skinny kids out there who have made a pact with each other," former New York City homicide detective Bo Dietl told the New York Times last week.
"The truth is he has other responsibilities in his life," criminologist Jack Levin said on Larry King's program on CNN last week. "He may be married. He may be playing with his children, watching football on Sunday, or he may have a part-time job."
The important question is, was the orgy of speculation harmless - or was there a very dangerous undercurrent to it? By saturating the public's consciousness with phantom images of thirtyish white men, did the media profilers distract attention from a more general and possibly open-minded search for the perpetrators? Did the speculation merely pollute further a well already tainted by faulty eyewitness accounts, such as the elusive (and evidently nonexistent) white van?
If so, the media's performance raises a chilling possibility: that the suspects might have evaded detection for so long because witnesses were focusing too intently on media-created "profiles" that didn't come close to the real thing.
Virtually all of the news media, including The Washington Post, carried some speculation about the identity of the killers, including the apparently accurate guess that the shooter was formerly in the military. There was perhaps something inevitable about this, given the absence of solid facts and the enormous fear and concern generated by the shootings.
But few in the media embraced speculation so heartily as the cable news networks. CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel offered hours and hours of guesses from a seemingly endless parade of experts: Levin and Dietl, former FBI profilers Robert Ressler and Clint Van Zandt, Washington profiler Pat Brown, ex-FBI agent Chris Whitcomb, former New York Police detective John Baeza and criminologist James Alan Fox, among others.
All the hot air apparently got to CNN's Lou Dobbs, who began his Moneyline program yesterday evening by blasting the "mostly useless blather" of the expert analysts on his and other networks.
But no one was offering apologies or retractions.
"We have no regrets," said CNN Senior Vice President Sue Bunda. "In the context of a discussion about the story, we lean on these folks who have expertise to help guide our viewers through it. . . . I think we were very responsible. I was quite proud of the seriousness of the way we covered it."
Dietl said in an interview yesterday that he "never in a million years" would have guessed that the two people arrested would turn out to be African-American.
But he made no apologies, saying instead, "I feel like I was part of the case, because I was on TV so much. I wanted people to feel that they could be a detective and that they could be the one who captures these parasites."
MSNBC Vice President Mark Effron says the speculation was caused by "a dearth of information, which causes one to talk about the possibilities and potentialities of the story. As long as we qualify it (as speculation), it's clear to the viewer that (the expert) doesn't have definitive inside information. Profiling is as much an art as a science."
But Peter Smerick, a former FBI profiler now with the Academy Group in Manassas, Va., seemed disappointed by the on-air performance of his brethren. "Whatever any of us say on TV, take with a grain of salt. It's utter speculation," he said.
"Before you or I can reach any conclusions about why these individuals did what they did, there needs to be a deep study. I can't offer an insight into the minds of the individuals because I don't have the facts."
He refused to be quoted further, except to emphasize: "We don't have the facts."
Criminal profilers may be the logical outgrowths of a society that believes that all of human reality can be quantified, a culture that has a touching faith in the truth-revealing ability of statistical analysis.
It's part of the same belief system that has given us governance by polls, insurance by actuarial tables, newspapers by readership surveys and just about everything else by focus groups. It has also given us criminal investigation by number-crunching spreadsheets and computer-enhanced conjecture.
But as the sniper case seems to reveal, profiling can be especially dicey when you're dealing with the madness of the human mind.
-(Optional add end)-
The modern-day elevation of the criminal profiler to the status of seer and prophet began with Jack Crawford - based on real-life FBI investigator John Douglas - in Thomas Harris' 1988 novel "The Silence of the Lambs."
In the wake of Harris' amazing success, profilers began cropping up in more novels: Patricia Cornwell's Benton Wesley, James Patterson's Alex Cross and Michael Connelly's Terry McCaleb.
And on TV: Samantha Walters in "Profiler" and Drew Haley in "Crossing Jordan."
And all over the place. Douglas went on to write his own books and, logically, he and other criminal profilers - sort of whodunit pundits - became frequent guests on talk shows and news programs. In 1997 Douglas was all over the airways after being hired by John and Patsy Ramsey to develop a profile of the person who killed their daughter, JonBenet. Douglas told Larry King and Katie Couric and everybody in between that the Ramsey parents were not involved in the crime.
Real-life profilers have appeared on TV to pontificate on the whereabouts of Eric Rudolph, the disappearance of Chandra Levy and the snatchings of young people this past summer.
But the length of the sniper case, the 24/7 TV interest and the lack of information all worked together to produce a particularly fertile flower bed for true profilers and armchair psychologists.
Friday, October 25, 2002
http://www.concordmonitor.com/stories/front2002/1025_tv_2002.shtml
