Deadline in Athens

Petros Markaris

3 ideas

1. Albanian couple's murder and silenced journalist

   In Athens in winter 1993, Inspector Kostas Haritos treats the murder of an Albanian couple as routine, and other Albanians are quickly held for it. Television reporter Yanna Karayoryi publicly hints that the police have the wrong men and that she has a bigger story, then is killed at her TV station before she can broadcast it. Haritos's investigation links both killings to a racket trafficking migrant children, which the couple and the journalist had each come too close to.

2. Migrant victims invite convenient migrant culprits

   When the victims are marginal immigrants, police and public readily accept that other immigrants killed them. That assumption closes the case fast and costs nobody socially. The convenience of the explanation substitutes for evidence and hides the respectable interests that profit from the migrants' vulnerability.

3. Ratings logic turns information into hoarded capital

   In a competitive commercial television market, a journalist's knowledge is worth most while it stays exclusive. So she withholds evidence from police to protect the scoop. The same incentive that makes the information valuable also leaves its holder isolated and exposed, and it lets the medium shape the public story of a crime before any investigation settles it.

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