Over the past few days, I have spent a lot of time watching interviews with Amanda Knox (and also some documentaries about Amanda Knox and the case about the implications regarding Meredith Kercher’s murder [in 2007 (Perugia, Italy) ]) — see e.g. “You see what you want to see” [ https://podcasts.video.blog/2022/02/15/you-see-what-you-want-to-see ]. I myself feel I have a strong connection to her experience, insofar as a long time ago I expressed my own opinion regarding what I now refer to as “irrational” media in a different way (see “Hope & Change: Flipping the F-word & Removing the Old-Fashioned R-word” [ http://remediary.com/2020/11/06/hope-change-flipping-the-f-word-removing-the-old-fashioned-r-word ] — and in particular in a way that at times garnered very vehement opposition. People often said to me things like my expressions were uncivilized. The reactions I got kind of reminded me of the idea that one shouldn’t “shoot the messenger” who merely transmits upsetting news. I found it odd (and even to this day I still find it odd) that people would criticize me when it is certain media organziations (an in particular “monetization” techniques) which are actually violating assumptions about ethical (vs. unethical) behavior.
What has been fascinating me perhaps most of all is the way Amanda Knox herself seems to instrumentalize the misinformation and supposition leading to the false accusation and conviction by a wide array of authority figures and “fact finding” institutions worldwide in her own storytelling, in a manner that seems to perpetuate the propagation of the very myths she herself is plagued by — it is a little reminiscent of the so-called “Streisand effect“, by which drawing attention to something raises awareness of that very thing, rather the way simply letting it go might do more to reduce its significance.
At first, I was puzzled about why Amanda Knox’s story is receiving so much attention right now, not until 10-15 years after it had first become such a sensationalist media event. The answers I have come up with (so far) involve a number of reasons.
First and foremost, the whole notion of “fake news” has in the meantime become nothing short of a global pandemic. Secondly, a “mainstream” (Hollywood) movie was released just last year specifically using the “Amanda Knox saga” as core to the story’s brand image. Yet what I find most intriguing of all (I think) is that the interviews I watched basically show that many basic facts regarding Amanda Knox’s case to this day remain widely unknown … and the uncertainty regarding the case remains so widespread … that the misrepresentations depicted in the Hollywood movie may indeed have more impact on interpretations of Amanda Knox’s character than all of the media coverage Amanda Knox has received in the mainstream media heretofore — and from that perspective, I can easily understand why Amanda would be quite upset about this. But that is not all: the multiplication of reports and documentaries and interviews and all sorts of more and more content make this one story ever more complicated, with even the slightest variations and different angles, emphasis and quite simply different storytelling making the “actual”, “factually correct” or “real” story seem ever more elusive. I see some irony in this, insofar as Amanda Knox herself is quite obviously also utilizing her own central role in the story for her own financial gain.
In all of this, what I find most disappointing is that Amanda Knox seems to have abandoned her own voice at AmandaKnox.com and instead seems to have sold out to the very manipulative irrational media complex which apparently destroyed her reputation in the first place [1]. She essentially adorns the Scarlet Letter in exchange for money. She plays the caged victim on display in the mainstream for cash in the pocket, instead of a liberated woman warning the masses not to drink irrational media poison for collective clearness of mind.
Fuck With News 