In the last words of her acknowledgments pages, she confesses, “Words just aren’t my thing.” This is evident as she happily romps through the fields of cliché - “playing the race card,” “all hat and no cattle,” “hot button issue.” Such careless handling of language, fortunately, doesn’t gum up the narrative. Television, a cool medium according to McLuhan, had a calming - not to say sedative - effect on the media environment.Īs the narrative of one man’s misfortune, The Lynching of Peter Wheeler, is lucid and readable, though the style is not exactly polished. In the long view, as well, the rise of a new medium of communication undoubtedly made such things as screaming headlines obsolete. The big city newspapers quoted by Charlotte Gray only a few years after the Kempton murder seem to have been reasonably restrained. It may also be that the local papers quoted by Komar really were written for a bunch of rubes. “The confession I gave to the Digby Courier,” Wheeler was quoted as saying, “is the only true confession I ever gave.” In one of the most ludicrous episodes in the book, a newspaperman for the Digby Courier attributed last words to the condemned man which in effect advertised the Digby Courier’s forthcoming version of Wheeler’s confession. Such a confession seemed a necessary part of the story - if one didn’t exist then it would be fabricated. After Wheeler’s sentencing, for example, newspapers vied with each other to present to their readers the authentic “confession” of Wheeler. That the newspapers were not so much conveying information as creating a story that the community lived out was demonstrated particularly by the press’s utter freedom in inventing facts. “The media publicly hanged Peter Wheeler long before the sheriff finally got around to doing it.”
“The media had been so effective in castigating Wheeler and so unwavering in their proclamations of his guilt, the court was hard-pressed to find a single unbiased potential juror,” Komar writes. Article contentīut it was the press, with its power of indirect reader participation and arousal, that contributed most to Wheeler’s doom. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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