late-breaking

[dragonlady7]

So, at work I generally keep a tab open in Firefox that has iGoogle in it-- where you can customize the homepage and it has all this random auto-updating crap. I have a news feed widget in there.
Every so often, I would click over to that tab, as I normally do, and in the course of scanning the page, I'd see news headlines.
One of them that's been making the rounds over the last couple of days, up and down the newsreader, is the one about this pregnant Marine who is missing.
First it was all, Nobody knows what's going on, she's almost about to give birth, where could she have gone, please if you're reading this call your mom she's worried. Etc.
Then it comes out, she was involved in some kind of criminal investigation-- as the victim.
Today the headline was that she was "troubled". The story had her stepmom explaining that she's a compulsive liar. It was outright stated that the investigation, wherein she had apparently accused a fellow Marine of rape, had gone poorly, and she was upset about it. Apparently she was facing charges of making a false accusation. Also her stepmom had just lectured her that she was unfit to be a mother and would have to give up her baby when it was born.
The story pretty much concluded she'd left town because she was about to be revealed as a big old liar. It's horrible when women accuse innocent men of rape, was the tone of the piece.
The next update of the page had the headline as "Missing Marine Bought Bus Ticket."
I clicked it, thinking (as I was obviously meant to), well, that's that. Her car was abandoned at a bus station; evidently she took the bus out of town.

Between the time the headline went up and the time I clicked it, the page had been updated. The opening line on the page was,
"Missing Marine is dead."
Between the time they'd concluded that she was a compulsive liar who had fled rather than be exposed, and the time they'd finished writing the story, they had found her body, in the yard of the man she had accused.

So much for drawing conclusions.

I have no doubt she was a person with an unquiet life, who probably did not have her shit together and most likely was involved in all kinds of trouble whether she meant to be or not. But I can't help but be pretty disgusted at how quick everyone was to believe that a woman who is pregnant out of wedlock and probably not terribly well-educated could not possibly have truly been raped by a man she was accusing of doing such.
And I'm sure her stepmother has more than adequately been punished by her own conscience and her own loss, but Christ.

Comments

[heebiejeebie.livejournal.com]

Behold the power of the internet

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

They do it on TV too. THe cable TV channels love to give you constant "updates" where they take one tiny fact and stretch it out to draw whole conclusions, because, well, they've got to update the public! But they usually don't have enough information to make a whole story. And all the news outlets report on what the others are reporting, and it's just vicious.

It gets to the point where you never get to see real, actual, complete stories anymore, because they're always being interrupted by "Breaking news! We don't know what's going on either but we're going to show you blurry camera footage of someone turning their face away!"

Ugh.

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

That's infuriating.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

It's just symptomatic of the we-must-have-constant-coverage-of-every-case nature of the online and cable TV news channels. They have to go live with a story even if they don't know yet-- so they have to pick a direction to go with the scanty facts, and when they pick one as wrong as this, it's pretty disgusting.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

Mayb I'm just dense, but the news stories I read led me to believe that she didn't leave because she was going to be exposed as a liar, but because she was upset that her stepmom said mean things to her. I never read anything about the investigation going poorly -- I read she was about to testify in some military court thing against him. Maybe I missed something.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

You might've missed the draft or two where they were going with her being a liar-- but on at least two of the occasions I reread CNN's story on it, the story contained a weird phrase to describe it so I remember. It said the military investigation had "gone sour" and I wondered how the hell an investigation could go like milk left out of the fridge.

[kittyc1978.livejournal.com]

What a sad story of what must have been a difficult life.

And I wish the media wouldn't tell us *everything* all the time, because they really could have waited a day and given us the whole story before making this poor girl out to be morrally substandard. It's all a plot to discredit the military and the people in it! (did I just jump to a conspiracy theory? sorry. I'm an emotional wreck right now)

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I know-- it's very frustrating to be given ceaseless updates on a story that contain no substantial new information. During my tenure as a bartender in the airport, where we had CNN on all the freaking time, I saw repeated instances of where they'd be having an interview with, like a senator or something, and they'd break in right in the middle, I'm sorry, there's breaking news, and they'd leap in and be like Preliminary reports suggest that Britney Spears broke a nail! Details to follow! And then they'd spend ten minutes reviewing the fact that they didn't know a damn thing, and rampantly speculating over whether this could be related to some other incident they also weren't fully informed about, and then they'd be all, "But of course, we don't know, for sure" after they'd already hinted heavily at a conclusion for you.

It's infuriating that they think I would choose that as a form of information-gathering.

And I'm sure Camp Lejeune is just thrilled over all the attention, which has thusfar failed to address anything of substance. I mean, when they recalled her roommate from a training exercise in California there was a brief attempt to pin it on him, until he talked to the media (apparently) and they realized he barely knew the girl, he was just giving her shelter. The poor guy's name is all over the media now. All he did was give a woman a place to crash while she figured out her life. Or, as it turns out, got fatally stalked.