Giving Away the Keyes
As we approach the release of Israel Keyes Life in Full Detail, Crime Culture Media is also quickly approaching 500 subscribers. We are not even close to done growing, which means that if you’re reading this, you were one of our earliest subscribers. You truly helped us get this all going, and we wanted to say thank you and remind you what we’re doing here.
We set out with a few goals in mind, one of which we’ve achieved: having an outlet where we were free from the censorship we had experienced trying to publish true crime media. Israel Keyes Life in Detail, our very first upload, was also the very first of our videos that YouTube removed, though it wouldn’t be the last. We had to make edits in order to re-upload it without the offending material. Life in Detail has been watched almost 100,000 times as of January 2025.
This censorship activity wasn’t just limited to our own content; our YouTube subscribers routinely reported having comments disappear as millions of Americans were targeted by what scholars, intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum named the “Censorship Industrial Complex” when they announced the Westminster Declaration, demanding that western governments dismantle this censorship apparatus.
Although this censorship is still occuring (a recent study found that 85% of government takedown requests now target Google with 54% targeting YouTube and 31% targeting Google Search) it is now at a much reduced scale. Stanford’s Internet Observatory was dismantled and the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center was shut down. The State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy announced it would no longer fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and Congress passed a law banning the Pentagon from funding GDI.
X is now a much free-er platform than Twitter was and Meta has recently announced plans to scale back moderation and “fact checking,” with plans to implement an X style community notes system less prone to bias and manipulation.
Despite that YouTube has yet to announce similar changes, Crime Culture Media is proud to have participated in the effort to pressure government and industry both to honor the constitutional right to free speech and the right to a free press that our ancestors died for. Our primary goal is in many ways simpler though equally ambitious.
The primary goal of Crime Culture Media is to revolutionize true crime journalism by giving you direct access to the evidence in addition to the work we create from it.
For far too long, true crime creators have acted as gatekeepers, filtering evidence through whatever frames they concoct, allowing you to see only pieces of the truth as they guard information from public records like dogs with a favorite toy. You deserve a lot better. We all do.
Israel Keyes Life in Full Detail was designed to correct this injustice the way a wrecking ball corrects a wall. In addition to the documentary itself, which is the most thorough factual look at Keyes that anyone has ever created, the accompanying article will have all of the information that we used to create it, in full.
Every document, every picture, every video, every interview, every interrogation, from every public records request we made. All of it. We have redacted only a handful of photos for the privacy and dignity of the victims, and we will host a public discussion even about that.
“But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.”
—Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
Whether you’re a free subscriber or a paid subscriber, none of this would be possible without you and your support means everything to us. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for reading, listening to, watching, and sharing our work. Thank you for your comments and likes. Thank you for helping us modernize true crime journalism, and publish the kind of unfiltered, fact based journalism that people deserve.