Guy Debord (1931–1994), was a French writer and filmmaker who cofounded the Situationist International, a late 1950s radical European avant-garde movement, which preached that, in the modern age, people had become like American science fiction author Philip K. Dick’s androids, dreaming of electric sheep, machines that simulate life to fill the emotional void left behind by the emptiness of lived experience. Under the beguiling, hypnotic effects of capitalism, automaton human beings chose simulations of reality over authentic inner experience.

Debord’s most famous book was The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which he defined modern consumer culture as a public show of mediated images, separating human beings from genuine life. His main insight was that the world in the premodern era was characterized by direct, tangible involvement, now replaced by the passive, indirect consumption of reproduced reality. Think Andy Warhol, who turned Campbell soup cans or the photos of Marilyn Monroe into an art form of images without any original production, in other words, no aura. In his day, the main culprit was advertising. In our day, we have much more to worry about: deep fakes, AI, teenage suicide caused by body shaming, internet addiction of all types, cultural conformity and its opposite, silo cultures, podcast populism and much, much more.

Debord’s inspiration led to psychogeography, the study of how our environment affects our perception. The kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, mother of TV’s Today show cohost Savannah Guthrie, is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. This true crime case, followed now by millions every day on television and the internet, began when Guthrie failed to show up at church on February 1. When friends raised the alarm, local law enforcement, the FBI, then the national media converged.

The official line was that Nancy was taken from her home against her will. Days later, investigators managed to recover doorbell camera footage that shows a masked person at her front door, gloved and apparently armed, tampering with the camera before it went dark. Engineers at Google dug into “residual data” beyond the reach of backend systems to retrieve the images after an initial assumption that the video had been deleted due to an unpaid subscription.

The clip instantly became a national media sensation, looped on cable and sliced into bits for social platform dissemination. The disappearance of an elderly woman was turned into a serialized thriller. The mystery of what happened is quite simple. She was taken, and her family wants her back. But the story that has ballooned around the case is anything but simple. It became, in Debord’s terminology, a spectacle involving public compassion, voyeurism, conspiracy and self-reproduction, so tangled that investigators had to spend significant time sifting not only through evidence but also through the fun-house mirror of public distortion. In Debord’s language, authentic social life was replaced by a pseudoworld of appearances, in which news consumers became passive observers of their own projections.

Within days of Nancy’s disappearance, ransom messages began arriving, not to the family, but to media outlets. A local station in Tucson reported receiving a detailed email claiming to be from her kidnappers, with information about damage to a floodlight and the location of an Apple Watch in Nancy’s house, details that appeared to match the crime scene. The celebrity gossip site TMZ said it had received a note demanding millions of dollars in Bitcoin for her safe return, to be sent to a specific, verified cryptocurrency wallet.

At least one man, Derrick Callella, was arrested and charged with sending fake ransom texts to Nancy’s daughter Annie and her husband, messages prosecutors said had nothing to do with the actual kidnappers but were rather an attempt to profit. The man has since been released on bail pending trial following an initial court appearance. 

Meanwhile, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have repeatedly urged the public to stop treating tip lines like chat rooms. After the FBI released the doorbell footage, officials asked people to call 911 or local nonemergency numbers only with actionable information and directed everyone else to online portals and dedicated tip numbers.  

In one sense, the Guthrie case is statistically extraordinary. In 2025, there were more than 49,000 kidnappings and abductions reported in the US, while only about 10% of the victims were 50 or older, and just 145 cases involved people in Nancy’s age group of 80 to 89. Only about 9% of all kidnappings that year were committed by strangers. But the same visibility that might help bring Nancy home attracts hoaxers, grifters, armchair detectives and people for whom other people’s pain is just another genre of entertainment.

The FBI has now plastered her image and that of the masked figure on her porch, across the country, and has raised the reward to $100,000. The Guthrie investigation now unfolds on two fronts: the physical search for an 84-year-old woman, and the digital management of a frenzied news cycle.

Now three weeks in, the picture is at once clearer and more unsettling. After a forensic review of the Nest video, the FBI now describes the suspect as a man between 5’9” and 5’10” tall, of average build, carrying a black Ozark Trail Hiker Pack backpack, a Walmart house brand that investigators are trying to trace through purchase records and other surveillance footage. DNA that does not belong to Nancy or to people known to be in close contact with her has been recovered from her property, possibly from gloves and other items found within several miles of her home, and is now being tested. Authorities say they have received more than 30,000 combined leads.

On a recent night, Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) trucks and forensic vans filled a street about two miles from Guthrie’s home as law enforcement executed a search warrant at a house linked to the investigation. Roads were blocked off for hours. One man was questioned and released; at the FBI’s request, local authorities have said almost nothing about what, if anything, they found. In other words, the case keeps generating drama, but not resolution. We have seen this before.

Lindbergh and the birth of the kidnapping spectacle

This is not the first time an American kidnapping has become a national obsession. It may, however, be one of the clearest cases yet of what happens when crime, celebrity and the business model of modern media fully converge.

Long before doorbell cameras and true-crime television, the US experienced what many historians consider its first modern media kidnapping, the abduction of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, in 1932.

Lindbergh was arguably the most famous man in America. The solo transatlantic flight — navigating by dead reckoning from New York to Paris in 1927 — turned “Lucky Lindy” into an international icon. When his baby son was taken from the family estate in rural New Jersey, the crime unfolded in the full glare of publicity.

The Lindbergh case set patterns that would echo down the century, starting with an avalanche of bogus leads as thousands of tips poured in. So did ransom notes, more than a dozen letters, many from impostors trying to cash in on the family’s desperation and the public’s prurient interest. Each had to be checked, consuming investigators’ time and attention. Newspapers reduced the case to a series of cliffhangers, mysterious messages, marked bills and dramatic handoffs in cemeteries. Complex police work, painstaking forensic analysis of a homemade, three-section wooden ladder used to reach the second-story nursery and the careful tracking of suspects had to compete with the press’s hunger for daily drama.

The Lindberghs’ grief became a national spectacle. Their home was besieged by reporters. Every move they made was scrutinized, interpreted and monetized. In the end, an immigrant German carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was arrested, convicted and executed for the crime. Yet the “trial of the century” left behind enduring doubts, not only about his guilt, but about how the carnival atmosphere might have skewed the investigation.

The case catalyzed new federal kidnapping laws, but it also ushered in something much harder to legislate away, the idea that a crime involving a famous family was not just a legal matter but an ongoing mass-culture event. The Lindbergh baby was the first kidnapping to become a kind of national “content,” updated daily. It would not be the last.

Getty and Hearst, on the miniseries model

Four decades later, another heir became headline fodder. In 1973, 16-year-old John Paul Getty III, grandson of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, was kidnapped off the streets of Rome. There were ransom notes from his abductors, but his grandfather at first refused to pay the $17 million, dismissing the abduction as a possible hoax. Then came the horrific “proof of life,” when the kidnappers mailed the boy’s severed ear to a newspaper, along with a threat to send him back “piece by piece.” The elder Getty eventually agreed to pay part of the ransom, structured as a tax-deductible business expense.

What stands out, in retrospect, is not only the brutality of the crime but the way it was mediated. Early coverage was dominated by class narratives. Was this a spoiled rich kid staging his own kidnapping? Was it a scam? Those suspicions were fed by the family’s own dysfunction, but amplified by a media eager to sell a story part true crime, part social satire.

Just as in the Lindbergh case, real ransom communications were surrounded by false ones. Opportunists phoned the Getty family, claiming to know the kidnappers; they sent fake notes and tried to insert themselves into a story that was at once a crisis and a global spectacle. Each intrusion demanded verification. Each verification drained resources. Statements by the kidnappers, the family, and Italian police all filtered through an international media system hungry for sensation. The result was a high-stakes negotiation conducted, in effect, on a public stage.

Getty III survived, though permanently scarred, physically and psychologically. The case became a cautionary tale about extreme wealth, family coldness and “value” when the commodity is a human being. But it also established a template, a famous name paired with a kidnapping created a kind of dark miniseries, replete with plot twists, villains and moral lessons. If Lindbergh and Getty turned elite kidnappings into media events, the following Patty Hearst case scrambled the formula by blurring the line between victim, celebrity and participant.

In 1974, Patricia Hearst, 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small terrorist cell, active from 1973 to 1975, that claimed to be a militant vanguard of the American left. The SLA had attained notoriety for murders, bank robberies and, then, the Hearst kidnapping. The group demanded not just money, but also a massive food-distribution program for the poor, leveraging Hearst’s family name and the media attention, which was a tactically novel gambit and perversely innovative.

Then something happened that even the kidnappers had not anticipated: Hearst twisted the drama to her own ends. On audio tapes sent to radio stations, she declared that she had joined the SLA, adopting the name “Tania,” and later appeared on Hibernia bank surveillance footage alongside her captors, wielding an M1 Carbine rifle. The photograph and video ricocheted around the world. Was she a brainwashed victim? A radical convert? A symbol of elite guilt? The Hearst case became a national obsession not only because of her lineage but because it seemed made for television.

Every tape the SLA sent was broadcast and dissected, an early version of what CNN later pioneered as content cycles, a relentless, round-the-clock, seven-days-a-week reporting model relying on immediate, sometimes sensationalized, updates rather than waiting for scheduled, daily or weekly broadcasts. Each message had to serve both as evidence for investigators and as fodder for pundits. Competing theories about Hearst’s agency, either as victim or perpetrator, played out in public. Law enforcement, meanwhile, had to parse the same material for leads, under the pressure and influence of public narratives.

Hearst’s eventual 19-month trial was less a quiet legal proceeding than a referendum on the meaning of American criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey’s “coercive persuasion” defense and consent in the age of mass media. The jury was composed of citizens who had already “known” Patty Hearst as part of the national drama. Although Hearst was convicted of armed robbery, the celebrity kidnapping stopped being a story about celebrities and shifted to a narrative about public media consumption. 

The media cycle spectacle 

By the late 20th century, the patterns established in the Lindbergh, Getty and Hearst cases were deeply embedded in American culture. Kidnappings involving elites, or at least people who could be framed as such, tended to become national dramas. Television accelerated that process. Cable news, with its 24-hour appetite, valorized live stakeouts, press conferences and aerial shots of search parties. The O.J. Simpson case in 1994–95, though not about kidnapping, entrenched the idea that certain crimes could function as national soap operas, with recurring characters and daily plot updates.

The true-crime boom of the 2000s and 2010s added new layers. Podcasts, streaming docuseries and “investigative” YouTube channels turned cold cases and active investigations into genres. In some instances, public attention has genuinely helped. The 2021 murder of travel vlogger Gabby Petito in Grand Teton National Park was partly solved after an online follower identified her van in another YouTuber’s footage, narrowing the search area and speeding the discovery of her remains.

But the successes come with costs. Legal scholars warn that jurors steeped in stylized TV procedurals expect forensic breakthroughs and dramatic confessions that reality rarely delivers. Their distorted expectations can influence verdicts and perceptions of guilt. This so-called “CSI effect” describes a paradox: the more people consume fictionalized justice, the more real justice can be derailed when evidence looks ordinary instead of cinematic.

Online forums encourage ordinary people to dissect cases in real time, often with very limited information. Misidentifications, conspiracy theories and harassment of innocent “persons of interest” have become common side effects. For influencers, commentators and some media outlets, every new case is also a new opportunity for ad revenue, subscriber growth and clout. The moral rhetoric is often one of “awareness” or “justice,” but the underlying currency is attention.

All of this forms the backdrop to Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance.

The Guthrie case in the attention economy

Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping was not just another tragic crime, but rather a test of how our current attention economy responds when a real person vanishes, and the story is, in effect, open to individual assimilation. Her case crystallizes the paradox of spectacle crime, precisely because she is not a celebrity in her own right, but rather a retired teacher, a churchgoer, a mother and a grandmother. Her “fame” is entirely derivative, as Savannah Guthrie’s mom. In Debord’s terms, the spectacle transforms active participants into passive observers of their own lives through the lens of an artificial public sphere. By identifying with media images, observers lose themselves in the melting pot of media-driven desire. 

That powerful connection was enough to make her disappearance front-page news and the lead story on national broadcasts for over three weeks now. Loneliness became nationalized, spawning live blogs, specialized subreddits, impromptu podcasts and waves of social-media commentary. Neighbors in her Tucson community tied yellow ribbons around trees and lamp posts, while a makeshift shrine of flowers and notes has grown at the entrance to her home. Women across the nation have read themselves into the drama. The relationship is entirely arbitrary. As Allison M. Alford, the author of a forthcoming book, Good Daughtering, observed, without any irony, Ms. Guthrie’s “unfiltered expressions of love and worry for her mother resonated with women who have complicated relationships with their own mothers.”

The attention is not just digital. A YouTube true-crime host from Australia, who calls himself an “armchair detective,” set up a kind of outdoor studio on the street in front of her house, streaming for hours every day to tens of thousands of followers. Viewers have ordered pizza and snacks for him, turning the block into a strange mix of crime scene, media camp and fan meet-up. Other true-crime enthusiasts have driven in from Phoenix simply to stand outside the house where the 84-year-old vanished, to “feel the story” up close.

From an investigative standpoint, some of this attention is helpful. The more people see Nancy’s face and the image of the masked person outside her home, the higher the odds that someone recognizes something, a gait, a backpack, a car. The FBI has blanketed interstates and city streets with digital billboards and has doubled the reward to $100,000 for information leading to an arrest or conviction. Authorities have published multiple phone numbers as well as an online portal for tips, hoping the network effect of millions of viewers will produce at least one actionable lead. Yet the same visibility also creates complications that would be unthinkable in a lower-profile case.

The first alleged ransom note did not go to the Guthrie family directly but instead landed in the inbox of KOLD News 13, a local TV station. The message reportedly contained detailed information about the crime scene and demanded millions of dollars in Bitcoin, with tight deadlines and escalating threats. TMZ later announced that it, too, had received a Bitcoin-linked note, this time from someone who claimed not to be the kidnapper, but to know the kidnapper’s identity, and who wanted one Bitcoin in exchange for that information.

This amounts to negotiation as a high-risk spectacle. Instead of private contact between kidnappers and family, mediated quietly by law enforcement, the ransom dynamic plays out through newsrooms and gossip sites, each with its own incentives and audiences. Officials have had to devote substantial energy to authenticating or debunking each new “message,” often under the gaze of those same outlets.

The crypto angle adds another twist. This weird modern currency is another type of spectacle, since the point of crypto is nonfungible value, but it is entirely copyable, as the phenomenon of worthless meme coins attests. Experts have pointed out that, despite its outlaw aura, Bitcoin is far from untraceable. Blockchain records allow investigators to monitor the movement of coins tied to extortion attempts in real time. That doesn’t stop criminals from demanding it; it does mean that every new wallet address mentioned in a note becomes another thread investigators must follow, whether the threat is real or a hoax.

Even beyond the arrest and release of the man accused of sending fake ransom texts, officials have acknowledged receiving multiple letters and emails claiming to know the kidnappers or to possess crucial information, for a price. Each hoax siphons time from the search for Nancy and adds emotional whiplash for her already traumatized family.

Savannah Guthrie and her siblings have responded in part by going public themselves, without TV makeup, as regular folk. In emotional Instagram videos, they have spoken directly to whoever is holding their mother: “We received your message, and we understand,” Savannah says in one clip. “This is very valuable to us, and we will pay.” In other posts, she has thanked strangers for their prayers, reposted the FBI’s stills from the doorbell camera with the caption “Someone out there recognizes this person,” and shared home-movie footage of her mother with the quiet vow: “We will never give up on her.”

Behind the scenes, the FBI has given the family advice on these messages, but officials say the final wording is theirs. The result is a kind of split-screen existence. The family finds itself both in private mourning and as actors in the public square at the same time. Their pleas function simultaneously as negotiation tactics and as media content.

As images of the masked figure at Nancy’s door spread, the Pima County Sheriff’s Office was forced to ask people not to clog emergency lines with theories or commentary, reminding residents that 911 and nonemergency numbers are for concrete tips, not viewers’ interpretations of the video. At the same time, online communities dissected clips, frame-by-frame, speculated wildly about suspects and spun elaborate scenarios, some involving cartel violence, others suggesting media conspiracies. Very little of that speculation is likely to help investigators, and some will surely muddy the information waters. This is the CSI effect in action. People who think they care, or help, or stay informed, actually participate in a spectacle that can and will impede the very justice they hope to see served.

Appearance as reality

The Guthrie case is fundamentally about a missing woman and a family in agony. But it takes place in a postmodern culture that turns tragic private lives into Netflix cliffhangers. One way to understand our culture is to look not at this specific crime, but rather at politics, and who else but at US President Donald Trump? The following is not an indictment or a political statement, but just an observation: Trump is an unusually literal embodiment of the politician as celebrity — a reality-TV star who became president and then, out of office, turned his legal troubles into an ongoing media franchise. His scandals have been covered like TV seasons, complete with teaser leaks, dramatic arraignments and press conferences designed for maximum visual impact and diversion.

Debord coined the phrase concentrated spectacle, by which he meant how charismatic leaders and totalitarian regimes maintain control through the cultivation of distraction and attention diversion. Last week’s outrage is replaced by this week’s new eruption. But Trump is more symptom than cause. He rose in an environment where visibility is the central currency of power. Politicians compete less on legislative skill than on memeability; governing increasingly requires showmanship. A bill signing becomes a photo op. A hearing becomes an opportunity for a two-minute campaign ad.

The same dynamics shape how we experience crime. A case like Nancy Guthrie becomes legible to the public partly because it fits familiar genres: the grainy security footage, the tearful press conferences, the countdown clocks to ransom deadlines. Savannah Guthrie is herself a skilled television performer, used to crafting narratives for a morning audience. Her visibility, and that of the Today brand, help generate the intense public focus that might save her mother’s life, but also the intense noise that investigators must now filter.

In a politics of spectacle, every event is a potential storyline. The line between “news” and “show” blurs. Structurally, the Guthrie case is being treated much like a major political scandal or a high-profile trial, with live updates, expert panels, branded graphics and emotional arcs.

This is not to accuse any individual journalist or viewer of bad faith, but rather to note the structural incentives. Outlets compete for attention in a crowded market. High-profile kidnappings drive clicks and ratings. Social platforms reward commentary and speculation. Public figures, politicians, pundits and even some law enforcement officials understand that their visibility rises when they attach themselves to such stories.

The cliché today is that politicians have to be celebrities to be heard. But that also means victims of certain crimes become celebrities whether they want to or not. Their suffering becomes raw material in a culture that treats every public event as potential content.

The human cost

The Guthrie investigation is still unfolding. As of this writing, the FBI says it is pursuing multiple persons of interest. Investigators confirmed that DNA not belonging to Nancy or her close contacts was found at her home. This evidence is being processed as a potential breakthrough to identify the perpetrator, but Nancy herself has not been found. A man detained during a traffic stop in Rio Rico, near the Mexican border, was questioned for hours and later released without charges; he has publicly insisted he is innocent and says he wants an apology. 

Whatever the outcome, the case has already revealed the contours of a disturbing reality. Investigations must now navigate an economy of attention as surely as they navigate an economy of evidence. Families in crisis are pushed into quasi-public roles, performing their grief and their negotiations on camera. Hoaxes, scams and conspiracies are not side notes, but rather are built into the logic of visibility.

For many people far from Tucson, what is happening to Nancy Guthrie is primarily a story, a narrative to follow, discuss and eventually, perhaps, move on from. The platforms through which we encounter that story are designed to maximize engagement, not empathy. The longer the case goes unsolved, the more content it generates.

The question, then, is not just how law enforcement can adapt, but how the public will as well. It would be easy to end with a pious call for “less media” or “more restraint.” But the history of celebrity kidnappings suggests the problem runs deeper than any editorial choice. It lives in the basic structure of how we pay attention, how Debord’s concept of the spectacle functions. There are ways, imperfect but real, to resist the worst distortions. For journalists and editors, one option is to treat active investigations less as serialized dramas and more as public-safety issues: minimize speculation, foreground verified facts, resist the impulse to publish every rumor that pings a newsroom inbox, especially when doing so might reward hoaxers.

For law-enforcement agencies, clarity about what kind of attention helps and what kind hurts can matter. In the Guthrie case, officials have been unusually explicit in asking the public not to flood emergency lines with analysis, but to use dedicated channels for concrete tips. Similar guidance on handling ransom communications, social-media outreach and false leads can set expectations early.

The hardest work, though, is internal. When public interest morphs from concern to compulsion, when people start refreshing for “updates” less out of hope for a good outcome than in search of the next twist; when they scroll through clips of sobbing relatives and grainy footage, are they witnessing someone’s pain, or consuming it? In an era when politicians must perform like celebrities to get anything done, and when crimes tied to famous names are framed as prestige dramas, it is tempting to think of attention as an unalloyed good, a form of solidarity.

The history from Lindbergh to Getty to Hearst to Guthrie tells a more complicated story. Attention can save lives. It can also distort reality, reward bad actors and turn justice into just another kind of show. In May of 1968, as students and workers staged an insurrectionist cosplay in Paris, Guy Debord quipped that “boredom is counter-revolutionary.” In the face of spectacle saturation today, one might respond, “Please yes, more boredom.”

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.