there's no "ethical" true crime

doing a good job starts there

Of the more “old-school” world of true crime, the sort that predated the true crime glut we now live in, my favorite practitioner is Keith Morrison on Dateline. (This is a preference I share with many people.) With his smooth, low voice and slightly ghoulish presentation, Morrison presents his tales of murder almost like they’re a species of American folklore: here’s Paul Bunyan, here’s Casey Jones, here’s Keith Morrison for Dateline with a strange sad tale from some small American town.

I suppose it’s also that Morrison gets why you’re there: you want to voyeuristically participate in the spectacle of people killing and people dying, in stories about justice and injustice and humanity at its extremes. He is in the entertainment business and he knows it. He does a good job because he gets that there is nothing good or wholesome about this particular appetite. So Morrison’s episodes of Dateline do not, as a rule, contain any gestures toward bearing witness, centering victims, systemic …