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Founder of Court TV: We Need to Examine America's Culture of Armchair Justice

Founder of Court TV: We Need to Examine America's Culture of Armchair Justice

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Trial by Media, a documentary series on Netflix that premiered on May 11, does its best to explore the impact of cable TV on the U.S. justice system. During hourlong segments, the show examines six trials whose outcomes were arguably shaped by the media and the court of public opinion. There’s the 1985 case of “Subway Vigilante” Bernhard Goetz, who shot four black youths he says he thought were going to mug him on the New York subway, and more recently, the 2009 bribery trial of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Each episode includes clips from the original TV coverage, ominous shots of the crime scenes, and a stream of talking heads who provide context and a veneer of scholarly ­analysis. It is, in other words, not so distant from the true-crime TV genre it claims to critique.

The format makes for entertaining television. (Not coinci­dentally, one of the show’s executive producers is Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV; others include legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and actor George Clooney.) As social commentary, though, the show falters. While few could argue that cable TV has had a totally positive effect on society, it turns out that proving it’s an unconditional menace is difficult, too. Legal outcomes, as viewers of the series will discover and anyone with a long memory already knows, have little connection to the court of public opinion. Before Blagojevich’s first trial, his approval rating hovered at about 10%; the jury was nevertheless hung on 23 of 24 federal charges.

Founder of Court TV: We Need to Examine America's Culture of Armchair Justice

Or take the episode exploring the 1999 police killing of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo. The 23-year-old had come to New York with hopes of getting a computer science degree. One winter night, as he fumbled for his wallet in the vestibule of his own apartment building, four police officers gunned him down in a hail of 41 bullets. Protesters, led by the Reverend Al Sharpton and Diallo’s unbelievably poised mother, rallied a national outcry; there were highly publicized demonstrations, and newspapers across the country covered the trial in terms generally unfavorable to the police. (“Officers in Bronx Fire 41 Shots, And an Unarmed Man Is Killed,” read a typical New York Times headline.) And yet, while no one denied the officers had shot Diallo, each was acquitted of murder; the jury ruled it an honest mistake.

There are several episodes, however, in which opinion and outcome line up. The most entertaining covers Richard Scrushy, the former chairman of HealthSouth (now Encompass Health Corp.), a physical-rehabilitation chain. A federal grand jury indicted Scrushy for fraud in late 2003. In the months between his indictment and his trial in early 2005, Scrushy, who’s white, reinvented himself as an ultra­religious pillar of society and began to frequent black evan­gelical churches. The series strongly suggests the move was an effort to sway members of the jury. “They said it was all manipulative, to poison the jury pool,” says a black preacher whose church Scrushy began to attend. “I said, ‘Hold on. You don’t understand something, we’re talking about the word of God here.’ ” In his first trial, Scrushy was acquitted on all charges; in a second, separate trial, he was convicted for bribery.

Founder of Court TV: We Need to Examine America's Culture of Armchair Justice

But even in that case, Trial by Media leaves the impression the most important factor in Scrushy’s acquittal wasn’t the media, but rather his homespun legal team facing a buttoned-up group of government prosecutors. “Alabama requires a down-home talent level,” explains one of Scrushy’s grinning lawyers. “You gotta have a Southern drawl, you have to go to church … and if you don’t have that, you don’t have a connection with the people sitting on the jury.”

That’s the paradox of Trial by Media. It’s a true-crime TV show that aims to unmask the social perils of … true-crime TV. The series recounts a 1984 rape trial in New Bedford, Mass., that was televised. The victim’s name was stated clearly on air, and her life spiraled into disaster as she was vilified and hounded from her town. The country was so scandalized that the U.S. Senate opened an investigation. “When a trial becomes a showcase,” Jennifer Barr, a rape crisis counselor, testified to a Senate subcommittee, “injustice is done to all of the participants.”

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