On Topic: Blaming the messenger for Amanda Knox, the election

I've had the same financial adviser-broker for forever. I've half-joked it might be the longest sustained relationship I've had in my lifetime other than with my parents.

She has offered excellent counsel over those years - conservative and measured, occasionally amenable to my possibly misguided inspirations. (Yeah, OK, thus far it indeed appears that Chipotle would have been a bad idea in the long run.)

But it took us a while to come to an understanding about 'the media.” She would say, after some market correction, You know the media blows everything out of proportion. And then I'd remind her, again, where I work and what I do for a living.

I am the media, or part of it.

Well, not exactly 'the media.” That term, in the view of too many, would corral many critters - the New York Times, the National Enquirer, Fox News, E! News, aggregator sites and, for some, even include Facebook, Twitter and other social media. The Gazette, bless its heart, doesn't have that same reach or resource firepower. (Oh, if only we did.)

I was thinking about the tendency to blame the messenger, and how we in the industry go about this business of journalism, after watching the documentary 'Amanda Knox,” which came available a few weeks ago on Netflix.

I've no idea who killed 22-year-old Meredith Kercher in 2007 in the small apartment she shared with Knox in tiny Perugia, Italy. But the documentary makes it appallingly clear no one got anything like a fair shake or a fair trial. Certainly not Kercher or Amanda Knox.

The investigation itself was nothing short bedlam, with law enforcement stomping all over the crime scene and its potential evidence - a knife, for example, likely the actual murder weapon, was handled over and over. Another item, a bra clasp belonging to Kercher that was used as key evidence, was discovered 46 days - more than a month - after the crime. Under a rug.

A reinvestigation two years later by an independent DNA lab in Rome characterized the initial crime-scene investigation as 'lots of chaos.” The knife itself, they determined, had been contaminated.

And then there's the lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, who confessed to loving reading fictional murder mysteries, who from little observations leaped to big conclusions, a al Sherlock Holmes - Kercher's body had been covered up after the fact, therefore only a woman could have committed such a crime - and had his sights set on the roommate, Knox, from the outset. ('Was a monster responsible for this?” he wonders in his interview with the documentary makers.)

Another flight of fancy: Police latch onto a cellphone message Knox sent to her boss at a Perugia bar in which she wrote 'See you later” as a solid admission that she planned to rendezvous with him later that evening.

Knox and her new boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted, to 26 and 25 years respectively, though they claimed to have been at his apartment that night. Her employer was held for a few days, and a local burglar - whom some suspect might have been the killer - also got jail time.

Police for equally flimsy reasons decided they had 'proof” there were three killers. That determination was revealed to the international media now camped out in town, and then reported worldwide.

In popular imagination-turned-journalism, the three killers morphed into a sex cult.

One British tabloid headline read in very large type: 'Foxy” - as in Foxy Knoxy - 'DNA is found on knife” - the kitchen knife that would have been in use by her in her own apartment. 'Knox led ritual killing,” another proclaimed.

Local law enforcement all along pointed to being pressured - but in a good way, they suggested at first - by the need to get results quickly due to the media spotlight. Rather than, you know, doing their jobs properly.

Later, the police would scold the media for forcing a 'frantic search.”

Ah, yes, the media. One talking head in the documentary, London Daily Mail freelancer Nick Pisa, who went to Perugia, defends every step he took in coverage:

'You've got to be Johnny-on-the-spot,” he says early in the documentary. He refers to Knox as 'a loon” and 'a nut job.”

He revels in his recollections of all those big headlines for his stories. He also defends publishing what later turned out to be false information on his readers who continually are 'logging onto the internet” for scraps of any information.

Poor judgment runs from the big to the insultingly trivial: During one of Knox's courtroom hearings, one TV commentator remarks how she could use some makeup. The implication being, I guess, that she could have applied eyeliner while waiting in prison.

Near the end, after Knox and Sollecito once and truly are cleared, some eight anguished years later, the astoundingly unself-aware Pisa asks, 'But, hey, what are we supposed to do? …

Not let your rival get in there first.”

Rather than, you know, doing your jobs properly.

So, enough blame to go around in this horrid affair - for justice, local law enforcement, the media and, hey, even you, the readers and TV viewers, if Pisa is to be encouraged.

My thoughts on all this won't surprise you. We here at The Gazette and at many honest and decent publications hew to the path we've been trained for. That includes doing our best to get the facts straight before putting them out there.

Doing our jobs properly.

l Michael Chevy Castranova is business editor of The Gazette; (319) 398-5873; michaelchevy.castranova@thegazette.com