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Tabloid TV programs have been bawdier -- and scrappier. After A Current Affair ballyhooed upcoming videotape of a call girl plying her trade with a bare-bottomed customer, said to be Fisher and a john, the competing Hard Copy aired a smidgen of the scene half an hour sooner, allegedly swiping it off a satellite feed. This prompted a lively melee over journalistic ethics in two corners not normally thought to possess many.
The invasion of their middle-class retreat has horrified Fisher's neighbors and those of her alleged victim, Mary Jo Buttafuoco. The throng of reporters has turned life near both houses into a kind of theater. At the Fisher home on a quiet dead end and at the Stitch N Sew fabric store owned by Amy's parents a few minutes' drive away, doors are shut, blinds are drawn, the symbolic drawbridge is up, and the castle is meant to seem inviolable. At the Buttafuoco home, the style is defiance. A steady stream of traffic, automotive and human, proclaims this a happy house where nothing has gone wrong. On the door is a wreath entwined with pink ribbon and dotted with pink and white flowers. At the high school the official posture is no comment, frequently laced with off-the-record worry that the headlines will somehow cheapen the whole place. Last week a mother snarled at a reporter, "There's more than one student in the school. You should have been here last night for the honors convocation." Then she slammed her car door and drove away.
The irony for Amy Fisher's schoolmates and neighbors, as they feel themselves victims of media marauders, is that many have surely been avid consumers of the tabloid journalism they are now deploring. Then, of course, the subjects of the story were safely distant, and embarrassed friends and associates not even thought of. In those easier times, this sort of story seemed to them juicy. They are learning that the juices in such stories are most often squeezed out of other people's lives.