makes me want to strangle the "news" magnates that turned it into a business of irresponsible hysteria to drive sales/ratings.
I actually don't really blame the media for this. Yes, they started the hysteria that certain breeds of dogs were
per se vicious.
But there were "professionals" involved in this situation--the police and AC--who should have realized right of the bat that the woman's injuries were not consistent with an attack by a large dog. From the descriptions of the injuries, that should have been completely obvious to anyone whose job is investigating suspicious deaths or animal bites. I suppose they might have thought Zeus knocked her down and killed her with the impact, but that also should have been pretty easy to determine, and is also not consistent with an "attack."
In other words, the people whose JOB it is to determine if a person died from a dog bite didn't bother to make thorough investigation. They just blamed the big dog and went out for doughnuts. Leaving aside the incredible injustice to both Zeus and his human family, that is almost unforgivably unprofessional and lazy. The cornoner report makes clear that, at the very least, the situation was very ambigious. Instead of waiting for the report (which do, I admit, take forever), or doing a serious investigation of their own, they blamed the dog, deemed the case closed, told the media, and killed the dog.
The media, in this case, just reported what it was told. If they had been told that the dog heroically tried to drag his dying mistress to safety, I don't doubt that there would have been a sad little human interest story in the local papers, if not the national ones.