Why Trials Should Not Be Televised
...fe symbols out of them, especially regarding social issues (Thaler 9): abused children (the Menendez brothers), the battered wife (Hedda Nussbaum), the abusing husband (O.J. Simpson), the jealous lover (Amy Fisher), the serial killer (Jeffery Dahmer), the date rapist (William Smith). It becomes difficult for viewers to see defendants as ordinary human beings. One can argue that gavel-to-gavel coverage of trials counteracts the distortions in sound-bite journalism (Clark 821). Yet even here a number of editorial assumptions and decisions affect what viewers see. Camera angles and movements reinforce in the viewer differing degrees of intimacy with the trial participant; close-ups are often used for sympathetic witnesses, three-quarter shots for lawyers, and profile shots for defendants (Enter 73-75). On-air commentators also shape the viewers’ experience. Several media critics have noted how much commentators’ remarks often have the play-by-play tone of sportscasters informing viewers of what each side (the defense and the prosecution) needs to win (Cole 245; Thaler 71,151). Continual interruptions for commercials add to the impression of watching a spectacle. “The CNN coverage [of the Smith trial] isn’t so much gavel-to-gavel, actually, as gavel-to-commercial-to-gavel, with former CNN Gulf War correspondent Charles Jaco acting more as ringleader than reporter” (Bianculli 60). This encourages a sensationalistic tone to the proceedings that the jury does not experience. In addition, breaking for ads frequently occurs at important points in the trial (Thaler 48). In-court proponents also believe that watching televised trials will help viewers understand the legal aspects of the judicial system. In June 1991, a month before Court TV went on the air, Vincent Blasi, a law professor at Columbia University, told Time magazine, “Today most of us learn about judicial proceedings from lawyers’ sound bites and artists’ sketches [...]. Televised proceedings [such as Court TV] ought to dispel some of the myth and mystery that shroud our legal system” (qtd. in Zoglin 62). But after several years of Court TV and CNN, we can now see this is not so. As a medium, TV is not good at educating the general public, either about concepts fundamental to our judicial system or about the complexities in particular cases. For example, one basic concept - “innocent until proven guilty” - is contradicted in televised trials in numerous subtle ways: Commentators sometimes make remarks about (or omit comment on) actions of the defense of prosecution that show a bias against the defendant. Media Critic Lewis Cole, watching the trial of Lorena Bobbitt on Court TV in 1994, observed: Court TV commentators rarely challenged the state’s characterization of what it was doing, repeating without comment, for instance, the prosecutions’ claims about protecting the reputation of Lorena Bobbitt and concentrating on the prosecution decision to pursue both cases as a tactical matter, rather than inquiring how the prosecution’s view of the incident as a “barroom brawl” had limited its approach to and understanding of the case. (245) Camera angles play a role also: Watching the defendant day after day in profile, which makes him or her seem either vulnerable or remote, tends to reinforce his or her guilt (Entner 158). Thaler points out that these editorial effects arise because the goals of the media (print as well as electronic) differ from the goals of the judicial system. His arguments runs as follows: The court is interested in determining only whether the defendant broke the law. The media (especially TV) focus on acts to reinforce social values, whether they are codified into law or not. This can lead viewers to conclude that a defendant is guilty because pretrial publicity or courtroom testimony reveals he or she has transgressed against the community’s moral code, even when the legal system later acquits. This happened in the case of Claus von Bulow, who between 1982 and 1985 was tried and acquitted twice for attempting to murder his wife and who clearly had behaved in reprehensible ways in the eyes of the public (35). It also happened in the case of Joel Steinberg, who was charged with murdering his daughter. Extended televised testimony by his former partner, Hedda Nussbaum, helped paint a portrait of “a monster” in the eyes of the public (140-42). Yet the jury chose to convict him on the lesser charge of manslaughter. When many viewers wrote to the prosecutor, Peter Casolaro, asking him why the verdict was not first-degree murder, he had to conclude that TV does not effectively teach about due process of law (176). In addition to being poor at handling basic judicial concepts, television has difficulty conveying more complex and technical aspects of the law. Sometimes the legal nature of the case makes for a poor translation to the screen. Brill admitted that, despite attempts at hourly summaries, Court TV was unable to convey to its viewers any meaningful understanding of the case of Manual Noriega (Thaler 61), the Panamanian leader who was convicted by the United States in 1993 of drug trafficking and money laundering (“Former”). In other cases, like the Smith trial, the “civics lesson” gets swamped by its sensational aspects (Thaler 45). In most cases print media are better at exploring and explaining legal issues than is TV (Thaler 4). In addition to shaping the viewers’s perceptions of trial reality directly, in-court TV also negatively affects the quality of trial coverage outside of court, which in turn limits the public’s “right to know.” Brill likes to claim that Court TV helps to counteract the sensationalism of such tabloid TV shows which pay trial participants to tell their stories and publish leaks from the prosecution and defense. “I think cameras in the courtroom is [sic] the best antidote to that garbage” (Brill qtd. in Clark 821). However, as founder and editor of Court TV, he obviously has a vested interest in affirming his network’s social and legal worth. There are several ways that in-court TV, rather than supplying a sobering contrast, helps to feed the media circus surrounding high-profile trials (Thaler 43). One way is by helping to blur the line between reality and fiction. This is an increasing trend among all medial but is especially true of TV, whose footage can be combined and recombined in so many ways. An excellent example of this is the trial of Amy Fisher, who pleaded guilty in September 1992 to shooting her lover’s wife and whose sentencing was televised by Court TV. Three movies about this love triangle appeared on network TV in the same week, just one month after she had been sentenced to five to fifteen years of jail (Thaler 82). The Geraldo Rivera held a mock grand jury trial of her lover, Joey Buttafouco; even though Buttafouco had not at that point been charged with a crime, Geraldo felt many viewers thought he ought to have been. Then A Current Affair had a series that “tried Fisher for events and behaviors that never got resolved in the actual trial. The announcer on the program said, “When Ms. Fisher copped a plea and went to jail, she robbed the public of a trial, leaving behind many unanswered questions. Tonight we will try to [...] complete the unwritten chapter (Cole). Buttafuocos’s lawyer from the trial served as a consultant on this program. This is also a good example of how tabloid TV reinforces people’s beliefs and play on people’s feelings. Had her trial not been televised, the excitement surrounding her case would not have been so high. Tabloid TV played off the audience’s expectation for what a televised trial should and could reveal. Thus in-court television becomes on more ingredient in the mix of docudramas, mock trials, talk shows, and tabloid ...