Please Shut Up, Jeff Greenfield

While jogging on my basement treadmill during the afternoon, I generally rove among several TV channels, including CNN, VH1, MTV, and AMC or TNT (if there's a good movie on). I flip most frequently to CNN. But today, to my chagrin, instead of the usual political chat-chat on CNN (which is at least entertaining if sometimes annoying), there was wall-to-wall coverage of the sentencing of serial killer Dennis Rader.

Now, please. Cable TV's obsession with the trial-of-the-week (which of course is always "the trial of the century") bores me to tears, because here is where the ratio of relevant information to sheer melodramatic gush reaches its lowest ebb. I find I can glean all the significant data about these trials in about fifteen seconds. Michael Jackson is a sleazy kook. Scott Peterson is shifty-eyed and looks guilty. And Dennis Rader is a deeply sick, evil man. Do I really need hours of reporting to spell out in elaborate detail exactly how kooky Michael Jackson is, how shifty-eyed Scott Peterson is, and how sick and evil Dennis Rader is? Not really. Nor do I find graphic descriptions of revolting crimes entertaining (I don't go to horror pictures, either).

However, as I surfed back to CNN this afternoon (hoping they'd finally abandoned the Dennis Rader Show and brought on Paul Begala or James Carville to talk about Cindy Sheehan), my interest was piqued by seeing Jeff Greenfield on the set.

I generally like Greenfield's political commentary (although like CNN in general he's been slowly drifting rightward in recent years). But today he was talking about the Dennis Rader case. And after making an observation about "the banality of evil" (the phrase itself has become awfully banal), he launched a theme that actually made me furious. The Dennis Rader case, he opined, would make even opponents of the death penalty rethink their position. After all, why should this man go on living and telling his story to the world? "And which publisher," Greenfield wondered aloud, shaking his head in disgust, "will be the first to offer this monster a book contract?"

Wolf Blitzer picked up on this notion, later asking one of the prosecutors in the case whether there would be any legal impediment to Dennis Rader writing books about his crimes (he got a vague answer) and adding a couple of other remarks about how outrageous it was that Rader should be permitted to revel in his killings in that way.

Well, Dennis Rader is (once again) a sick and evil character. But if Jeff Greenfield and Wolf Blitzer think that book publishers will be lining up to offer him a contract they are full of crap.

In his commentary, Greenfield mentioned several of the most notorious serial killers in history--John Wayne Gacy, Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Jeffrey Dahmer. None of them has ever had a book published. (You might recall that Kazynski's rambling attack on modern technology was printed in some newspapers, at his demand; it was never published in book form.) And when I scanned the list of hundreds of books about serial killers that are available on Amazon (evidently it's a popular subject), I found that none of them are by a serial killer. Many, many of them claim to offer a glimpse "inside the mind of a serial killer," but they are by journalists, detectives, or what have you--not the killers themselves.

The closest thing I could find to a serial killer's autobiography was something called Final Truth, which is an as-told-to book written by someone named Wilton Earle and based on interviews with a killer named Donald Gaskins. It was published in 1992 by a company called Adept, which I've never heard of and cannot find a website for. We're not talking Simon & Schuster or Random House here.

As someone who has made a living in book publishing for the past twenty years, I deeply resent the implication by Greenfield and Blitzer that mainstream publishers have been profiting by publishing the writings of serial killers. It's a lie.

And coming from two high-paid commentators on CNN, it's especially galling. If anyone in the media is making money from crime stories, it's the cable TV networks. They are the ones who are filling hours of air time with endless regurgitation of details about stories like the Rader killings and the Natalee Holloway disappearance--the more gory and salacious the better--interspersed with outraged cries for revenge, denunciations of "soft" judges and juries, and paeans to the death penalty. Now there are entire networks (Court TV) devoted completely to gladiatorial courtroom combat, and TV stars (Catherine Crier and Nancy Grace) who have built entire careers around titillating crime reportage.

God knows we book publishers have our flaws. But we don't deserve sneers about our professional standards from the folks at CNN.