Economists know something called "Say's Law"--that is, supply creates its own demand. Or, to put it another way, if people make it, customers will come. That's one reason why capitalism works: because when a capitalist makes something new--say, sliced bread, or an iPod--people realize "Hey, I want that!" And so they work harder than ever to get it, and so the capitalist system goes around another time, only faster.
And so too the saturation coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey case over the last decade can be seen as an application, too, of Say's Law, in which the "supply" of news about crime creates its own demand for being caught as a criminal.
In their saturation coverage of the case, over this past decade, the media have, I suspect, created a demand among people who desire themselves to be saturated in media coverage. Suspect John Mark Karr is obviously a twisted weirdo. And so far at least, his story doesn't seem to make sense; JonBenet's death was anything but an "accident." So yes, let's test his DNA, test the handwriting sample, and so on, but there's still not much evidence that the little girl was killed by an outside intruder. Within hours of his arrest, when other media were trilling about the vindication of Patsy Ramsey, and how sad it was that she had died before this news, FNC's Greta Van Susterenwas the first that I saw to raise the possibility that Karr's was a false confession--a confession made, perhaps, for the publicity.
The media, including cable news, have a right to cover whatever they wish, of course, but there must be a realization that saturation coverage is likely to cough up insane wanna-be copycats as well as the guilty. We'll see.
