On the Media: ‘The Jinx’ and Confessions

Curiously enough, there is actually a precedent for the news that broke over the weekend with a blockbuster HBO documentary playing an outsized role in an ongoing media sensation of a criminal case.

Decades before Andrew Jarecki’sThe Jinxplayed a (as yet not fully clear) role in the arrest of the perennial murder suspect and troubled millionaire Robert Durst, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s true-crime classicParadise Lost(about the West Memphis Three) bumped up against the realities of an...