From The Law and Politics Book Review

Vol. 9 No. 1 (January 1998) pp. 3-5.

 

THE PRESS ON TRIAL: CRIMES AND TRIALS AS MEDIA EVENTS by Lloyd Chiasson Jr. (Editor). Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. 248 pp. Cloth $59.95. Paper $28.75. ISBN 0-275-95936-8.

 

Reviewed by William Haltom, Department of Politics and Government, University of Puget Sound. Email: haltom@ups.edu.

 

Because the press itself gets tried only in the first case study (John Peter Zenger) and perhaps the last (O. J. Simpson) in this assortment of observations regarding reports of courtroom dramas, the subtitle does the contents more justice. Some authors do try the press for complicity in making spectacles of trials. A few observers task reporters for propagating social, legal, and political myths. Other authors could not have been less forensic. Arrayed between an opening statement and a verdict, sixteen case studies justify no useful generalizations but do divert readers.

Readers in search of diversion will find concise accounts of arresting cases. Some chapters might jump-start undergraduate papers about trials and alert students to "trials of the century" that involved defendants who played neither football nor the saxophone. The average college student could learn about the Scottsboro Boys, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Chicago Seven, or the Haymarket Riot. Each case has inspired a substantial literature to which the capsules in this volume might direct students. The less renowned story of Harry K. Thaw will pleasantly surprise most readers and might lead to a major research contribution. Pithy essays on Zenger, the Boston Massacre, John Brown, Charles Manson, and William Calley could assist students who need to brush up on basic U. S. history. Finally, enterprising students might compare cases across chapters: the Lizzie Borden verdict versus the Simpson verdicts; similarities between the trials of John Scopes and the Chicago Black Sox; or resemblances between the Calley and Manson prosecutions might yield interesting theses. Thus, undergraduate libraries should probably consider this collection for tyros.

Selections will surprise or disappoint some readers but omissions are unavoidable. The trials of Dr. Sam Sheppard, media events if trials ever were such, elicited but one mention. Analysis of the prosecution of alleged conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln might have enhanced discussion of John Brown’s trial, just as short pieces on William Kennedy Smith, the Rodney King four, or the Menendez brothers might have deepened the chapter on O. J. Simpson. A celebrated Supreme Court case¾ Muhammad Ali’s comes to mind¾ could have added appellate dimension to other criminal cases. Perhaps authors or editors should have commented on the far more common outcome of prosecutions by reviewing press coverage of plea bargains. The Tonya Harding imbroglio might have worked in this regard. Cases outside the United States (other than the Zenger and Boston Massacre matters) would have expanded the scope of the study.

The greatest virtue of this assortment may be its journalistic bent. The authors seem to have modeled modern journalism in the act of describing it. Descriptions are often cursory; analyses fleeting.

Perhaps "The Verdict" (Chapter Sixteen) accounts for the unsystematic, uncritical tendency of both this collection and most trial coverage:

 

A considerable body of press criticism now looks at media coverage not in terms of its accuracy or its biases, but as a compendium of stories, much like literature. And these stories can be interpreted like any other anthropological artifacts, as cultural indicators. (203-4)

 

Does this book indicate that the culture of mass media has penetrated scholarship about mass communication? Let us explore this possibility.

Mass media tend to exaggerate and exploit drama. The essays in this volume tend to focus on human interest, drama, and titillation even to the detriment of documenting trials as media events, an enterprise that the subtitle stated. The chapter on the Scopes Trial, for example, tracks conventional accounts of Bryan versus Darrow far too much and adds too little to understanding the reportage of H. L. Mencken and others. (Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize history of the trial probably arrived too late for consideration in this collection.)

Mass media also tend to play up the personal at the expense of the institutional and historical. Too many chapters trumpet defendants and attorneys as dramatic personages, which may be why the concluding chapter is so inconclusive.

Just as mass media tend to reduce events to bites, case studies that range between ten and eighteen pages and average thirteen pages must oversimplify and overlook.

The dramatized, personalized bites in this book reach facile conclusions little supported by systematic data or critical thought. Consider another judgment in "The Verdict," the book’s concluding chapter:

 

Hauptmann’s was a contentious trial for many reasons, but it was framed by the status of the participants and the hard times of the Depression. In the end, the public perceived the trial in the most American of storylines¾ rich man versus poor man. (206)

 

Even if a reader conceded that rich versus poor was a superlatively American storyline, the reader might suspect that nativism or xenophobia contaminated the trial more than class. If so, the editor’s interpretation would be tendentious were that interpretation supported by evidence or authority in the chapter on the Lindbergh kidnapping. This ungrounded assertion is more unfortunate because Alfred N. Delahaye’s chapter on the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann assesses coverage quickly but carefully. Delahaye directs his readers to a storyline perhaps more American than rich versus poor: lawmakers, police, and prosecutors driven by media hysterics to subvert due process.

Students of the most recent case in the volume will be surprised to learn from the same concluding chapter that

 

O.J. was important only insofar as he was a black man. The trial, not the murders, was about race. … Elements of the trial intrigued us¾ O. J.’s celebrity status, the now-famous police "escort" of the white Bronco, the incidents of spousal abuse¾ but race was the trump card. The selection of a minority jury. The death of two whites at the hands, possibly, of a black. … (207-208)

 

Such racial reductionism may prevail among white commentators in the mainstream press and legal pundits on "Rivera Live" but exemplifies what W. Lance Bennett and others have lamented as the mainstream media’s inclination to "normalize." Had the editor here superimposed the class interpretation used in the Lindbergh case onto his conclusion about the Simpson criminal trial, he might have tasked his own specious claim. The editor’s remarks about the Simpson prosecution might have complemented normal, mainstream, majority rendering of the Simpson criminal trial with alternative views. If reassuring banalities go unchallenged concerning a media event that has gushed dozens of books, what hope may we harbor for penetrating, informing analyses of media reportage of cases less overreported?

In sum, readers will derive from this set of essays the most learning if they use the set to ask why students of mass media have offered such journalistic essays. I have hypothesized that analysts have herein come to mimic some objects of analysis. This volume could be read to suggest that what we behold and what we construct we become. At the end of this century and especially this decade in America, that sobering implication is enough to drive students of law and courts to drink if not to think.

 


Copyright 1995