Lis­ten now: One Seg­ment

With the fac­tual dis­tor­tion that is a long-standing fea­ture of Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism, one should fol­low the Amer­i­can ver­sion of the news with a crit­i­cal eye. This pro­gram dis­cusses the dif­fer­ence between Euro­pean cov­er­age of the mur­der of fash­ion designer Gianni Ver­sace and that pro­vided by the Amer­i­can media. The Amer­i­can media focused almost exclu­sively on the the­ory that Ver­sace was dis­patched by one Andrew Cunanan, an alleged “gay ser­ial killer.” The Euro­pean pre­sen­ta­tion of the event sug­gests that other pos­si­bil­i­ties should be con­sid­ered as well. The broad­cast presents and ana­lyzes alle­ga­tions that Ver­sace was killed by the Mafia to silence him and that Cunanan was killed by the same ele­ments in order to dis­guise the Ver­sace mur­der. (It has been main­tained that Versace’s com­pany was being used to laun­der money for orga­nized crime.) In addi­tion, the seg­ment high­lights dis­crep­an­cies in the “offi­cial” ver­sion of the killing, includ­ing the inabil­ity of some inves­ti­ga­tors to iden­tify Cunanan’s body, vari­a­tions con­cern­ing the bal­lis­tics evi­dence, dis­con­ti­nu­ities in the foren­sic evi­dence and the curi­ous behav­ior of the care­taker of the boat on which Cunanan’s body was found.