Why Foxy Knoxy Gets No Respect

I'm in London now and can't get enough of the Foxy Knoxy murder trial, which is playing big in all the British papers. In any reasonable news world, none but the most virtuous should be able to get enough of Foxy Knoxy. It's a sex murder with an especially young and comely American girl at the center of it. Tabloid shows and cable news networks have been built on much less.

And yet, in the US new media, it's at best a ho-hummer.

So what gives? Has the US media found itself a new sense of propriety and moral center, or is it just, as in so many other instances, out of it. Too depressed about its future and uncertain of its function to follow even the scent of blood and sex?

To recap: The promiscuous girl next door goes on her junior abroad to Italy, where she has lots of sex, smokes tons of weed, meets other students and rootless young people from exotic places, has the time of her life, and then one day finds her British roommate raped and with her throat cut. The hapless and desperate Italian authorities shortly implicate the American girl, her Italian boyfriend, and an African bar owner in the murder. Then, possibly because this is Italy, they convict a more or less random passerby for the murder. At the same time, the authorities continue to insist that an orgy-gone-wrong is the motive for the murder and that Amanda Knox is the mastermind.

As stories go, this one ought to be irresistible.

I've got two theories for why it's gotten no traction in the US.

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