Entries associated with the tag "Drew Peterson":

The screaming headlines in Wednesday's Sun-Times were misleading at best.

Page one: "DREW'S PALS WORE WIRE." On page eight, where the story began, "DREW'S CHILLING 'I SHOULD HAVE HAD THAT B---- CREMATED.'"

The front page was nothing but headlines. "Two of Drew Peterson's closest friends," said the drop head, "recorded months of intimate conversations with him for the State Police."

Smaller headlines at the bottom of the front page announced: "On His Murdered Wife Kathleen: 'I should have had the bitch cremated.'" 

And,

"On the Investigation of Kathleen's Drowning: 'It was in a dry bathtub, what a bunch of idiots.'"

Wow! What else is on the tape? 

Apparently, not even the above.  Read the story. The dry bathtub line is something Peterson's pal Paula Stark says Peterson told her in 2004, when Kathleen Savio, his third wife, was found dead. The should-have-had-her-cremated line is something pal Len Wawczak says he remembers Peterson telling him when authorities decided early last November -- after Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared -- to exhume Savio's body. The story indicates that Wawczak and Stark (who are married) started wearing wires later in November.

As far as a reader can tell, reporter Joe Hosey didn't hear the tapes, didn't read a transcript of the tapes, and didn't even confirm there are tapes, those spurious quotations notwithstanding. A token of the Sun-Times's meretriciousness is that despite the paper's ostentatious claims that the story was a "Sun-Times Exclusive," Hosey's a reporter for Joliet's Herald News, a Sun-Times News Group daily that also carried the story. 

Prosecutors are lucky. In a legal system whose watchword is “Innocent until proven guilty,” they get to presume guilt from the get-go. Journalists have it tougher. Before a character like Drew Peterson has been convicted, charged, or even arrested, they can’t come right out and say he murdered his wife. But they can order no-holds-barred coverage based on the proposition that’s what he did. If journalists thought he was innocent the only decent thing would be to respect his privacy and leave him to his grief.

Casual readers who think the story of the suspicious disappearance of Stacy Peterson's been around forever are remembering the story of the suspicious disappearance of Laci Peterson. This one’s even better. It was hard to make Scott Peterson interesting; but the media are now drawing a portrait of Drew Peterson as a Bluebeard, a man whose past wives were lucky to escape with their lives – if they did. Of course, all this coverage wouldn't be a bit fair to an innocent man, but it's telling us that innocence is more than Drew Peterson deserves.