David E.’s Fablog has a good post about the recent 20/20 program that gave Matthew Shepard's killers a chance to tell "their side" of the story. ABC has clearly decided that there’s money to be made in revisionist history -- at least as long as the victim is gay.
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THE ART OF HATE
It would be ever so nice to pass over the whole wretched thing in silence. But when a major television network makes as much noise as ABC -- currently in full crow over its twin dramatic hits Desperate Housewives and Lost -- it's pretty hard to avoid the latest puff pastry from its news division, inedible though it may be. The 20/20 "investigation" of the murder of Matthew Shepard, claiming that it's characterization as "Hate Crime" was off-the mark, while offering up all manner of hearsay and obfuscation of the historical record is easily exposed as the piece of shoddy homophobic tripe that it is by the most cursory of Google searches of the original story, not to mention more contemporary reports, and statements of the Shepard family in response to this attack on their brutally murdered son.
Not that ABC cares. It got what it wanted -- a tabloid TV "golden oldie" to fill in the "sensation slot" now that Scott Peterson is no longer news, and the Michael Jackson trial has yet to get underway.
"Ms. Vargas, the striking brunette who replaced Barbara Walters as co-host of the show in September, has wasted no time before taking on a risky story: the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard," notes the New York Times. But it's hard to see the "risk" the presumably intrepid Ms. Vargas ( the new replacement for Roy Cohn's beard) incurred in scrupulously supervised jailhouse interviews with the killers.
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Send 20/20 a piece of your mind. If that link gives you an error message, Reader Anthony suggest trying: 2020@abc.com.
