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.