Americas Fascination with Serial Killers - 692 Words

As Boorstin identified, we choose who is famous by our attention, what they do in fact is not what determines their fate. Fame is no longer about the deed behind it, but simply the spectacle – Hitler made the cover of Time magazine seven times, Stalin following with 12 covers of his own. The line between people we love to love and people we love to hate is becoming thinner and blurred, so we thrust not only heroes into the public view but also ‘villains’. This confusion between fame and celebrity owes a lot to the change in newspapers over time; where once they delivered unbiased and detailed factual accounts on events that happened, in the new age of mass media they began to compete with the magazines. Tabloidisation meant that rather than objective articles based on fact we were instead victim to the ‘murder hype’, with sensation-fuelled stories about the latest fashionable murder trial, the papers giving the killers their own stage name and persona to match. The idea of giving serial killers their own moniker is something that has contributed tremendously to the glamorisation of killers, because it is much like a stage name that you would give an actor or a singer. The names can either relate to the act or style of killings – i.e Jack The Ripper, which conjures a mental image of the killer at work – or could be to do with their location as in ‘The Boston Strangler’. This trend seems to originate from the United States, for it is across their newspapers and news shows thatShow MoreRelatedSerial Killers in Modern Society1558 Words   |  6 PagesSerial Killers in Modern Society Introduction For hundreds of years, serial killers have actually been a huge fascination all over the world. Even though society has an undeveloped idea as to what a serial killer is and how they function, there is much more to serial killers that people are probably unaware of. In spite of classic myths regarding serial killers which are displayed a lot in movies, this essay will recognize serial killers as irregular as the individual that utilizes various strategiesRead MorePsychological Profile of a Killer1577 Words   |  7 Pageselevation in serial killings. To give some insight into the scale of the problem posed by the serial killer, in the United States can be gained from examining the statistics for just one year. In 1989 (the last year for which detailed figures are available) there were 21,500 recorded homicides, of which some 5,000 are unsolved. Unofficial sources believe that as many as a hundred serial killers may be at large at any given time. 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Oates works, and somethimes even Oates herself, have been subject to responses ranging from