Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement wants to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media wants a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama—drop by bloody drop—in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, or break them, or find loopholes to work around them.
If people knew how it's done—how the media seduce, buy, bribe, and corrupt, like an inevitable, malignant cancer on a murder investigation—they might be too sickened to buy the next ticket to the carnival. But as Mark Fuhrman relates in The Murder Business, a heinous crime can produce many victims, and high-profile murders can hurt innocent people who get burned by the spotlight, whether or not they sought it out themselves. This searing indictment of the media shows how the criminal justice system can be manipulated by money, power, politics, fame—and all too often, ratings.