Richard Jewell is dead, at the age of 44.

...

For those of you who don't immediately recognize the name -- which would almost surely be the way the man himself would've wanted it in the first place -- Jewell was, for 88 days in 1996, the prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, which killed one person and wounded more than a hundred others.

Jewell was a security guard at the park and found the suspicious bag containing the bomb. He warned others about it and attempted to move them out of harm's way; there's little doubt that the death toll would've been much higher had Jewell not intervened, and indeed, at first he was hailed as a hero. But then something happened -- something entirely unsurprising when you consider the grotesque nature of modern media saturation and just what's required to keep it running in a manner that's satisfying to both the unscrupulous monsters at its helm and the hungry public it supposedly serves: Richard Jewell was turned into a villain -- the perfect villain actually.

An interesting obit cum indictment of the US media apparatus.

Sidenote : Last night I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, which likewise takes media companies, and the "journalists" employed by them, to task for lazy, unscrupulous or outright absent attention to topics of substance. It's worth a watch if only for the cinematography and acting but was otherwise, despite one or two missteps, quite exceptional.