OMiTB · In The Dark · Paul Holes
Should true crime be a personality-driven genre?
the true crime that's worth your time
The frustration over the sudden cancellation of In The Dark has yet to abate. Over a month ago, we noted a strange and sudden announcement from Minnesota Public Radio that it had shut down APM Reports, the producers of award winning and impactful true crime podcast In The Dark.
The way it was announced was not great, as Sarah noted at the time, but things didn’t get better last week when MPR officially announced the podcast’s cancellation in a statement that did little to quell worries that the public radio outlet was failing to heed public interest.
Following a thoughtful assessment of our portfolio, we have made the decision to end our support of some APM Reports programs, including In The Dark and The Water Main, and realign others, including 'Educate,' the Investigative Journalism Unit and 'Call To Mind,' within MPR News.
While programming decisions that result in the elimination of roles are never easy or made in haste, this reorganization will enable MPR to improve journalistic collaboration, achieve greater operational efficiencies, and provide new resources for coverage of topics that connect with our audiences and drive impact.
The move was enough to prompt nonprofit news org Racket to pen a lengthy piece headlined “What the Hell Has Been Going On at MPR?;” as Sarah noted last month it suggests a culture of “lip service paid to diversity and meaningful change, but only the kind that doesn’t re-slice the board’s pie.”
But it gets better, by which I mean worse: last week, MPR staffers received an email saying that eight positions at the outlet would be cut as a result of the cancellations. According to the Minnesota Reformer, two people were laid off when MPR first announced that it was shutting down APM reports, “but the company didn’t provide any details about who else would be laid off for more than five weeks.”
That lack of communication prompted workers at the outlet to file an unfair labor practices complaint against MPR, Inside Radio reports, and “the remainder of the staff has continued working while worrying about if they could be let go.” According to the Reformer “Until Wednesday, the five-person In the Dark team was working on a third season on an unannounced topic,” but that work has ceased and the layoffs — which, one hopes, will be negotiated with MPR worker union SAG-AFTRA — have begin. Again, we say, this whole thing seems pretty out of touch, and decidedly not great. — EB
Enzo Yaksic is mad as hell at Paul Holes. Yaksic is a well-known and longstanding serial crime researcher, and the founder of the Atypical Homicide Research Group and board member of the Murder Accountability Group — he’s a tech and data-driven analyst who’s arguably the opposite of any talking head pundit you see in a standard true crime property. According to a 2016 report from Boston Magazine, “his work is poised to change everything we think we know about serial killers,” so let’s just say he’s probably not a guy you’d want to have a quiet viewing of Copycat with.
Though Yaksic has a blog on his site, he took to Medium for his latest essay about Paul Holes, the seemingly ubiquitous former cop and star of various podcasts and TV shows. In fact, you can listen to Sarah and guest Mike Dunn discuss one of Holes’s shows, The DNA of Murder, on a 2019 episode of The Blotter Presents. Yaksic is not a fan. Here’s a snip that I broke into paragraphs — Yaksic published it as a single one but that’s unreadable via mobile, in my experience:
It is easy to see how someone like Mr. Holes, who spent decades of his life searching for the same individual, would believe that all serial murderers behave the same way that Joseph DeAngelo did in his heyday. Pair this myopic tunnel vision with a blind acceptance of other wildly asinine prevalence estimates and the ongoing societal obsession with the same decades-old stories about Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, Berkowitz, the Behavioral Science Unit, and criminal profiling, and who can blame those who fail to see how the phenomenon of serial murder has evolved since the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
The new moneymaking scheme of repurposing old real-world cases for entertainment while updating them for a modern audience (think Criminal Minds) was made popular by two profiteering brothers who formed a production company after retiring from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and have become celebrities. The use of the serial murderer as a marketing ploy to sell merchandise like beer, card games, video games, and board games, or a plot device to make a television program edgy, funny, topical, or unique, or as either a desperate play to explain an equivocal death or to inject doubt into an ongoing narrative, or as a means to rehabilitate an actor’s career each continues to be a reliable gimmick.
We live in a day and age where it is in vogue to attend festivals and consume drinks named after notorious murderers all while its hosts sit smugly behind the scenes amassing wealth, power, and notoriety. But these self-serving behaviors only confuse the public who unknowingly view the distorted manner in which serial murderers are portrayed across these mediums as an accurate representation of how they behave in real life. Worse yet, maintaining the relevance of Golden Age serial murderers through entertainment also has real-world consequences in the form of providing aspiring serial murderers fodder for their own deviant desires and giving killers role models to emulate.
So, it’s not just Holes he’s taking to task; Holes is just a symptom of the problem, Yaksic argues in his dense and passionate piece against the pop-culture aspects of true crime. By the end, he’s urging readers to, in essence, vote with their dollars:
Please allow me to petition you to think critically about who benefits from the existence of the ‘true-crime personality’ before consuming their products. We have allowed a select few individuals to elevate their stature on the backs of the dead. But it is not too late to reverse course and demand, at the very least, adherence to an ethical code of conduct when dealing with such sensitive matters. Remember that those who posture and grandstand for victim’s rights probably do not care as much as they want you to believe they do.
And like some others, he thinks that we’re on the tipping point of a true crime reckoning, though he doesn’t say what form he believes that will take.
Is this a #MeToo thing, or an unveiling of greed? And when if it happens, will the folks who gulp down various giggly wine-dribbled properties even care? What do you think? — EB
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Sticking with the true crime ambivalence theme, here’s a provocative essay from Jezebel. “I Hate Viral True Crime Culture, But I Love ‘Only Murders in the Building,’” Kylie Cheung writes, which makes me want to ask Enzo Yaksic for his take on the Hulu series. It appears that Cheung is a recovered viral true crime fan troubled by the genre as a trend:
I adore Only Murders, but my affection for this show bugs me a little, considering that its premise is rooted in the same viral, voyeuristic, true crime-obsessed culture that I despise in real life. For full transparency, growing up, I consumed my fair share of Dateline episodes with my mom and sisters. But—and I apologize in advance for sounding like I’m ancient—today’s youth aren’t indulging in rigorously reported deep dives hosted by veteran journalist Keith Morrison; they’re going down rabbit holes on TikTok and YouTube created by opportunistic, clout-chasing, unqualified influencers and podcasters who are racing to get ahead of stories about missing white girls as victims’ families grieve (and as missing women and girls of color go ignored).
When Gabby Petito disappeared last summer, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms were overrun with obsessive analysis and theories from true crime junkies, while Petito’s family mourned. The New York Times reported that the most prolific of these TikTokers, some of whom created dozens of videos at the height of the mystery surrounding Petito’s disappearance, got millions of views on their videos, and saw ballooning follower counts. None of these social media personalities are professionally trained investigators or journalists, yet they’d hijacked Petito’s story for their own gain, recklessly spreading what often turned out to be misinformation—a small price to pay, apparently, for more followers, sponsorships, and money. It was an illustration of a trend: In recent years, true crime podcasts and content have become a massively profitable, multi-million dollar industrial complex.
(Side note inspired by the use of “unqualified” above: do you think this guy who had to be rescued from the Sierra National Forest while “investigating” the dehydration deaths of a family was pulling together a podcast, was he a wacky conspiracy theorist, or both? And am I the problem for briefly considering a podcast investigating that guy’s investigation?)
Cheung’s brief blog post is well-reasoned (except for the part where she says Mabel wears “ridiculous outfits,” which is false, her outfits are great). But I also wonder if she’d like OMiTB if she didn’t have that ambivalence about true crime in the first place — and it made me wonder if that’s part of why I like that show so much, too. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: Introducing beloved properties (or not) to our nearest and dearest.
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