To American ears, the word can seem odd, even comical: dingo. Sounds a lot like “dingbat.” Wasn’t that what Archie Bunker called his wife, Edith, on “All in the Family”?

But there is nothing laughable about the dingo, Australia’s native wild dog and a predator capable of inflicting considerable harm. Certainly, nothing was funny about the most famous episode involving that animal: the 1980 disappearance of 9-week-old Azaria Chamberlain while her family was camping in the Australian outback. Her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, said that a dingo had entered a tent where the baby lay, and made off with her; the body was never found. An initial inquiry supported her account. But then another inquest was held, and soon Ms. Chamberlain stood accused of having slit Azaria’s throat. Found guilty of murder in 1982, she was sentenced to life in prison, only to be released three years later when new evidence surfaced that absolved both her and her husband, Michael Chamberlain, who had been convicted as an accessory after the fact. Even so, it took nearly three more decades before a coroner, in 2012, finally issued what the now-divorced parents had long sought: full vindication in the form of a death certificate formally ascribing Azaria’s fate to a dingo attack.

The Retro Report series of video documentaries examining major news stories from the past takes a fresh look at this Australian tale even though it may seem remote from American experience. It is not. A defining element of the dingo story was news coverage that might reasonably be described as a circus if that would not be a gross insult to circuses. Americans are surely no strangers to three-ring court cases of their own, whether that of O. J. Simpson in the 1990s or the continuing trans-Atlantic juridical odyssey of Amanda Knox.

One can go back further, to the 1950s and the ordeal of Sam Sheppard. He was a Cleveland doctor convicted of murdering his wife, Marilyn, in their home, despite his insistence that an intruder had killed her. (If that summary rings a bell, it may be because the Sheppard case is widely assumed to have been a model for “The Fugitive,” a popular 1960s television series and a 1993 film starring Harrison Ford.) Newspapers in effect convicted Dr. Sheppard before he had even been arrested. “Why Isn’t Sam Sheppard in Jail?” a Cleveland Press headline thundered on the front page. The coverage was so lopsided that in 1966 the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction, citing the “carnival atmosphere” and the trial judge’s bias. In a new trial that year, a jury found Dr. Sheppard not guilty.