At least Max Clifford and the father of Meredith Kerchner have a good excuse. Both men have recently delivered categorical pronouncements on the guilt or innocence of a person under the shadow of legal proceedings.
In Clifford's case it was Shrien Dewani, accused of procuring the murder of his wife while on honeymoon in South Africa, and Mr Clifford's excuse was that protesting Mr Dewani's innocence was exactly what he was being paid to do.
In the case of Meredith Kerchner's father, interviewed recently as Amanda Knox's appeal hearings began in Italy, the excuse was parental grief – which seems fiercely defensive of the idea that his daughter was killed by three people rather than just one. He was openly outraged by the idea that Knox should attempt to prove her innocence – as if her guilt was one of the few consolations left to him. And if you were judging their take on these matters I suppose you'd note first that they're both interested parties.
We're all interested parties of course, and not just in the sense that these two stories have proved utterly gripping in their unfolding. Because we rush to judgement as well, and are tempted to do so by our appetites for a particular kind of narrative.
You could see this at work most dramatically after the recent arrest of Julian Assange, with his detractors apparently deciding that any crime would do and his sympathisers reflexively jerking in the other direction, so that the women who have laid charges against him were pre-emptively (and on virtually no evidence in either direction) declared guilty of false accusation.
Lip service was paid, on both sides, to the conceptual difference between an allegation and a fact – but it was clear that a lot of people had made their minds up in advance to go with a storyline that matched their politics.
In cases like that of Amanda Knox and Shrien Dewani, our motives are less obvious. The South African Tourist Board might understandably favour an explanation that depicts the event as almost unprecedented rather than typical, but that's neither here nor there for most British readers.
What does matter to us is our appetite for the story itself. To put it bluntly, if Anni Dewani's murder was a random act of violence by two township thugs, it's far less engrossing than if it was a pre-planned hit – just as it was more "interesting" for Lindy Chamberlain's baby to have been sacrificed in a cult ritual than snatched by a feral dog.
We want life to have significance – and so we're eager for details that make sense of the senseless. And newspapers know how to feed that.
Yesterday it was reported that CCTV images of the Dewanis shortly before the murder had emerged: "Shrien keeps his hand in his pockets and makes no physical contact with his new wife, who walks silently behind him with her head bowed", read one press description, and thus utter banality was slyly called on behalf of the prosecution.
To be honest I'm no better than anybody else at resisting the temptation of this kind of thing. I have my convictions. But I do try and remember that, for the moment, they have almost nothing to do with admissable evidence. And that innocent people can get trapped in a good story.
