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Here's a column in the Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune in re this story...

http://www.columbiatribune.com/2006/Feb/20060223Feat001.asp

TRIBUNE COLUMN
Real life can’t be boiled down to television reality show clichés

By TONY MESSENGER
Published Thursday, February 23, 2006

I’ve been voted off the island.

That’s my conclusion after four days of answering e-mails and phone calls from armchair lawyers who watched the CBS News-produced "48 Hours" segment Saturday night about the murder of Tribune Sports Editor Kent Heitholt.

Folks who have never met me, who didn’t know Heitholt and who have never been to Columbia have passed judgment on my opinion that the jurors got it right. The jurors convicted Ryan Ferguson of murder. His partner in crime, Chuck Erickson, convicted himself. Since I’m the dope they showed at the end of the show who was willing to say what I thought at the time and still think, I’ve incurred the wrath of couch potatoes everywhere who skipped the Olympics to watch a good mystery.

Never mind that the show was more slanted than Lindsey Jacobellis on a snowboard. Ignore the omissions, such as how Prosecuting Attorney Kevin Crane destroyed memory expert Elizabeth Loftus on the stand and the lack of any questions whatsoever about the great American family who let their kid stay out drinking all night on a school night. Forget the errors: This was not the city’s only unsolved murder, and I’m a columnist who happens to have a radio show, not the other way around.

For Mr. and Mrs. Smith who plan their lives around various shows beginning with "CSI," watching a one-hour synopsis of a murder case that took more than three years to solve gave them all the ammunition they needed.

Forget the jury. Forget the weeklong trial.

"Free Ryan Ferguson," they scream.

That’s what the retired private investigator from Montreal, Canada, told me when he called. That’s what so many e-mailers from places far and wide suggested when they told me I obviously don’t know jack.

"I investigated this article and I have determined that Chuck Erickson is a fruit cake," wrote a man named Al Osborn who goes on to say he knows who the real killer is. "I have done this enough that I know what I am doing. I’m going to put the ball in your corner."

"Robbers do not usually strangle their victims, people with personal issues do," wrote Troy Axtens before asking whether I could help him peruse Heitholt’s old columns so he could find the real answers.

"I am completely disgusted in how you reported this case, and I hope your conscience is giving you no rest!" wrote Elizabeth Arnett after screaming in all caps and giving me a headache throughout her e-mail.

Finally, Richard Cohen got it right. He thinks the "48 Hours" story showed him the way, also, but he at least said one thing that rang true:

"This is all very sad."

Yes, it is.

It’s sad that our culture has diminished to the point where our opinions are shaped by the reality-television world in which we live. It’s a world defined by clearly delineated conflict with heroes and villains. It’s not truth so much that we seek, but the right kind of celebrity - the next "American Idol" or the person who is so untalented that we can make fun of them.

We revel almost as much in the misery of others - see the Jacobellis reference or the Olympic conflict between speed-skaters Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick - as we do any story that has a message of truth.

The truth of the Ferguson murder trial is that it was a maddening case, and for most of us who sat through it, it remains so. You can’t find somebody in Columbia who doesn’t have an opinion on innocence or guilt, and most of those opinions are derived from some combination of biases that our system of justice tries to strip from jurors.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been e-mailing one of the jurors from Lincoln County who decided Ferguson’s guilt. Like so many of us who lived with this case for so many days or months, he continues to be haunted by it. He thinks he did the right thing. He hopes he did the right thing. He knows, after having sat in the jury box and listened to the judge, that the concept of "reasonable doubt" in real life means something a whole lot different than what it means in a quick sound bite on television.

Real life, this juror knows, doesn’t fit into the nice little box that tries to turn complicated messages into black and white. That might be the lasting message of the "48 Hours" piece on a tragic murder case that can’t be whittled down to a single headline or television show. As the Tribune reports today, "48 Hours" producers were so intent on making Ferguson look good that they committed an unforgivable journalistic sin, editing out a Tribune photo of Ferguson in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit and replacing it with one in which he wore a jacket and tie.

CBS News didn’t want a mystery, and it didn’t want the truth. It wanted a reality show, because that’s what viewers want. Those viewers are playing the game to perfection by passing judgment in a fraction of the time it took 12 jurors to send a young man to jail for most of the rest of his life.

I agreed to play a role in that reality show, so make no mistake, I deserve whatever comes my way. But if that’s the island we live on today, you can forget kicking me off.

I’m already swimming away.

Tony Messenger is a columnist at the Tribune. His column appears on Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday. He can be reached at 815-1728 or by e-mail at tmessenger@tribmail.com.