AP English Language — Style — Drill 1

The following text is adapted from a modern personal essay on the rise and ethics of true-crime media. True crime has become the ambient sound of American anxiety. It streams from earbuds on morning commutes. It fills the space between dinner and sleep. It is consumed, in its most popular forms, with a casualness that its subject matter — violent death, usually of women — would seem to preclude. I have listened to enough of it to know that I am implicated in what I am about to criticize. The best true crime is genuinely investigative: it reopens closed cases, surfaces suppressed evidence, and occasionally produces outcomes — exonerations, new investigations, legislative changes — that justify the intrusion into victims' lives. The Serial podcast's first season, whatever its limitations, renewed scrutiny of a conviction that may have been wrongful. The Jinx produced a confession. These are not trivial achievements. They represent journalism doing what journalism is supposed to do. But the best true crime is not the true crime most people consume. Most true crime is not investigation. It is atmosphere. It is the slow construction of dread, the lingering over details that serve no evidentiary purpose but create a sensation of proximity to danger — proximity that listeners can experience from a position of complete safety. The victim becomes a character. The killer becomes a character. The crime becomes a story, with pacing and tension and, often, an ending designed to leave the audience wanting more. The word that troubles me is wanting. Audiences want more of this. They request it, subscribe to it, rate it favorably, recommend it to friends. This wanting is not shameful — it connects to ancient and legitimate impulses toward narrative, toward the comprehension of violence, toward the attempt to understand how ordinary lives end in extraordinary ways. But wanting is also the economic engine that drives producers to find new cases, new victims, new atrocities to render in intimate audio. The appetite precedes the content. The content must keep feeding it. What I find myself unable to resolve is the relationship between the form and its effects. Does consuming true crime make people more fearful, more alert, or simply more accustomed to the proximity of violence? Does the investigative impulse — the desire to solve, to understand — redeem the voyeuristic one? I do not have clean answers to these questions. What I have is the discomfort of someone who keeps pressing play.