V ol. 11 No. 2 (February 2001) pp. 97-99.

TABLOID JUSTICE: CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN AN AGE OF MEDIA FRENZY by Richard L. Fox and Robert W. Van Sickel. Boulder: Lynne Riener Publishers, 2001. 225 pp. Cloth $55.00. ISBN: 0-412-03458-X. Paper $22.00. ISBN 1-55587-938-1.

Reviewed by Thomas Shevory, Department of Politics, Ithaca College.

Richard Fox and Robert Van Sickel, political scientists from Union College and Purdue University, Calumet, respectively, offer us a very useful primer on the "tabloidization" of news, with specific reference to crime news and its impact on various publics' attitudes toward the justice system. The study should be of interest to scholars engaged with media and politics issues, and it could be a useful text for a variety of undergraduate courses in communications and legal studies.

The work focuses most of its attention on six major criminal cases of the 1990s: The William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the trial of the police officers that assaulted Rodney King, the Menendez brothers' murder trial, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Louise Woodward "nanny" case, and the impeachment trial of William Jefferson Clinton. The book opens with useful summaries of the circumstances surrounding each of these cases. These recountings are helpful in that their juxtapositions set the stage for the book's main argument, which is that during this decade the "mainstream media" went "tabloid."

Fox and Van Sickel contend that increased attention paid to high profile trials has crowded out other more civics-oriented news coverage. Although there may be some "public benefits" that accrue from the shift from "hard" to "tabloid" news, such as increased awareness by citizens of the existence, and to some extent operations, of the court system, the "tabloid nature" of the coverage tends to skew it toward the hyperbolic and undermines its potential as a public teaching tool. As they put it, "We believe that regular, detailed, factual coverage of public policy, government, and the legal system is simply more important than stories about individual criminal trials, let alone stories about the personality quirks of defense lawyers, the hairstyles of attorneys, the analyses of the president's phone sex preferences, or extensive video footage of Jon Benet Ramsey's beauty contests."

To defend the thesis that tabloid style coverage has increased, the authors provide a variety of statistical supports. Comparing three periods - - 1968-1974, 1975-1989, 1990-1998 -- in terms of the amount and quality of attention to "marquee trials" in each, the authors find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that news coverage of key criminal trials has increased. The number of news segments allotted to Charles Manson's trial was smaller than the number assigned to Claus Von Bulow's trial which was smaller in turn than those apportioned to O. J. Simpson's trials. Moreover, tabloid crime stories have moved up in priority. They are now more likely to be lead stories than they were in the past. Also, it isn't just that the

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nightly news programs themselves have changed. Cable news channels have reinforced the trends and cheaply produced network magazine shows, likely to cover high profile crime stories, have proliferated. It is worth remembering that in 1997 we were, as a public, subjected to the bizarre spectacle of the President's State of the Union message being interrupted on CNN and MSNBC by announcement of the O. J. Simpson civil trial verdict while ABC ran the results along the bottom of the television screen. Overall, the authors' statistical evidence is accessible and convincing and it supports what many of us have no doubt observed through our own more casual encounters with the popular culture.

Although the case that tabloid coverage has increased is relatively straightforward to make, the second aspect of Fox and Van Sickel's thesis, i.e., that this trend has had a negative impact on the polity, is somewhat harder to disentangle. The authors do, however, support this second proposition with evidence from an impressive survey that they conducted as part of the research process. They note that members of the public seem to know a good deal more about the subjects of the tabloids than they do about institutional or policy matters. (75 percent of respondents in their survey knew the damage award in the Simpson civil trial, while only 49 percent could name the Russian President Boris Yelstin and only 10 percent the identity of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.) Civic ignorance is, however, only part of the problem. The authors also contend that tabloid coverage of trials undermines the criminal justice system itself by casting it as a virtual circus. Thus, 75 percent of respondents in the survey stated that their confidence in the system had been eroded by the Simpson trial. Also, negative views regarding the perceived fairness of the outcomes of specific cases correlated with a negative view of the criminal justice system as a whole.

Fox and Van Sickel also test the hypothesis that erosion of confidence in the system is not class, race, or gender neutral. Some of the findings here are surprising. For example, while the analysis supports the notion that African Americans were more likely to view the outcome of the Simpson criminal trial in positive terms, and that African American respondents are less likely than their white counterparts to be "confident" in police conduct, the most important explanatory variable for determining overall confidence in the criminal justice system appears to be class. The least well-off, whatever their racial characteristics, tend to be most likely to see the system as being biased toward the more affluent.

In gender terms, men seemed to have a slightly more positive view of the system but differences with women were not found to be statistically significant. The only case in which there was a statistically significant correlation between perception of fairness and gender difference was the Jon Benet Ramsey case. Fox and Van Sickel conclude that, "our broader search of polling data did not reveal any evidence that general views of gender equality of gender fairness have shifted significantly in the wake of the tabloid justice cases."

The overall conclusion that Fox and Van Sickel draw from the analysis of survey data is an ironic one. They contend that the tabloidization of the news has driven "nearly all Americans" to "question the basic equity" of the legal system, and thus may have even brought us all together in recognizing the need for "deep reform". However, the WAY that the tabloid system has done this

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is problematical. It has undermined substantive discussion of issues because it presents the trials as "ENTERTAINMENT" (emphasis in text). What Fox and Van Sickel would like to see is "dispassionate and detail-oriented discussion," which they believe is "required to develop meaningful and workable public policy solutions to the many intractable criminal justice problems that virtually everyone agrees exists".

What is most valuable about TABLOID JUSTICE is its attempt to provide a systematic account of what many of us of a certain age have no doubt come to take for granted, i.e., that the quality of news coverage has declined over the last few decades in such a way as to collapse the distinction between "news" culture and the rest of the mass entertainment industry, and that this is not an entirely auspicious development for a presumably democratic society.

The book raises two questions implicitly that are never entirely answered to my satisfaction. First, what exactly is "tabloid" coverage, and how does one distinguish it from "real" or "hard" news? Is it the subject matter that mostly counts or the way that it is presented? Fox and Van Sickel are not entirely clear. At times they seem to conflate "tabloidization" with "trial coverage." The President's impeachment trial is, for example, included in some of the analysis. Although it certainly had elements of a "tabloid" story, it also provided, I think, something of a civics lesson regarding the operations of the constitutional structure. I wonder what Fox and Van Sickel would do with the intense coverage of court hearings involving Florida's election fiasco? Again, elements of "tabloidization" were arguably present (especially regarding the deconstruction of Kathryn Harris's fashion sense), but so were fairly arcane discussions of state election law. Juxtaposing Watergate with the Jon Benet Ramsey trial, as Fox and Van Sickel do, is provocative, but it may result in certain oversimplifications.

Also, I wonder whether Fox and Van Sickel may be attributing too much power to these public spectacles. It may be that trial coverage reinforces a sense on the part of many that the system is out of whack, but I doubt that it has created that sense. My guess is that those without wealth and status have long known that the legal system is disposed unfavorably towards them. No doubt those lessons are often learned the hard way through individual and community experience. Media depictions of trials may turn out, inadvertently, to be depicting the concrete realities of how the system operates for some and against others. True, coverage of the hairstyles and dating habits of various participants may reinforce a cynical and disempowering view of the legal system. However, perhaps it also reflects how our legal processes actually function as organized systems of power.