Do you know who Amanda Knox is?

Sep 25, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

If you ask the average Brazilian or Chinese in Guyana who Amanda Knox is, you would get a negative answer.
These ethnic communities seldom read local news and in the case of the Brazilians, their television sets are always tuned to Brazilian programmes. Guyanese who follow American television news would have heard the name. Prior to a murder in Italy, not even the ordinary Americans knew about this young lady.
Amanda Know comes from Seattle, Washington. She is an average American whose parents are quite ordinary citizens. They are not even upper middle class. So how come Ms. Knox is now a household name in the US? While as an exchange student in Italy, she was convicted of killing her female British roommate with the assistance of her Italian boyfriend during a night of debauchery and excessive sexual energy. She was convicted and jailed.
If that crime had occurred in the US, the average American, much less the world, would not have heard about Amanda Knox. People kill people all the time in the US.
The American media – from obscure newspapers to the most important television – networks have run stories on the innocence of Ms. Knox.
It is no exaggeration to say that all the important media houses, with no exception, have covered the details of the crime and the trial of Knox.
It is really a situation that should find its way into the Guinness Book of Records. Never before in the history of the US media has an ordinary citizen, without a background of wealth or fame, been given so much national publicity for a crime that is basically everydayish in the US –homicide
From following the case and reading about it, my belief is that Ms. Knox is guilty as sin. Let us leave out American hubris, in the sense that the media cannot accept that any other country should try and convict an American citizen and concentrate on why Ms. Knox is so popular with the media.
Of course it has to do with American chauvinism but there is another dimension of this case that ought to interest the media in Guyana.
We must ask ourselves that even though the American media is obsessed with reporting on the Amanda Knox issue, they could have ignored it because in the US, Amanda Knox is a non-entity.
My belief is that it also has to do with the culture of human rights that is embedded in the American media, something we should learn about in this country.
I don’t know if all the top class media houses are reporting on Amanda Knox because they think Americans should not be tried in the courts of other country but I believe among those media organizations is the belief that she is innocent and whatever is her station in life, she deserved the attention of the American media.
This is the angle of the Amanda Knox infamy that interests me and it has lessons for us in this country.
I have worked with the media since 1988, and my experience is not one that I can say in a 110 percent ebullient. I do not think the plight of ordinary men and women are given the media coverage that it deserves. I am not exempting any media house in Guyana from this criticism.
We in the media tend to concentrate on those who have status and wealth and we neglect the ordinary citizen. If a drunken driver runs into a group of well known citizens, the coverage would continue for days. If the poor victims are a bunch of unknown villagers, then it becomes a one-day item.
We should reflect on whether there are many media houses who think that Amanda Knox as an ordinary American deserves her case to be publicized.
If I was to write a book on my experience in the media, I would definitely mention that one of the lowest points for me was my reporting on the peremptory expulsion of students from Mae’s School for the possession of cell phones. After I wrote that column and detailed the times it happened, the media (none of them – print and electronic) pursued this egregious policy.
I still cannot believe that in the middle of a school term, the principal of a school would administer immediate expulsion of a student, not for a weapon, not for stealing, not for sexual offence, not for vandalism, not for an act of violence but for the mere possession of a cell phone.
I honestly believe that such an infamy could only take place in Guyana. And the media remains silent.

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Do you know who Amanda Knox is?

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