How the Lindbergh baby kidnapping changed media

The Lindbergh baby kidnapping case is the “perfect story,” says Tom Doherty.

“I’m a media person, and like most of America in the age of Netflix, I have an obsession with true crime,” says Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University. “The Lindbergh kidnapping case is right at the intersection—it’s a crime story and a media story.”

There’s a lot of writing about the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the subsequent investigation, and the trial and conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, but in a new book, Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (Columbia University Press, 2020), Doherty takes on a new angle.

“I found most of the books about the case are sort of true crime accounts about what happened during the kidnapping, the trial, whether Hauptmann was guilty or not guilty, those kinds of questions,” Doherty says. “Nobody had done a book exclusively on the media revolution.”

Here, Doherty talks about the case and why it was so important:

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