Like a reformed drunk who decides that only prohibition can save sinners like himself, Don Hewitt has lately been proselytizing against television in the courtroom, or in certain courtrooms.
On the “Today” show, on CNBC, on “Crossfire” and on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, the godfather of “60 Minutes” has argued that the camera is not only more powerful than the pen but also too powerful for the public good when it focuses on trials, or at least murder trials, or at least the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
Hewitt’s reaction to the Simpson spectacle is sounder than his prescription. In his Op-Ed piece, he resorted to rhetorical questions, those shaky substitutes for argument: “Would freedom of the press suffer if there were no camera?” “Where is it written that the public has a right to know?” Peculiar questions coming from a journalist, and uncompelling ones.
Open trials are ingrained by both law and custom. Until the advent of television the public could not be admitted to the courtroom; now it can be.
To use the Hewittian device, isn’t that in keeping with the spirit of the Sixth Amendment’s call for a public trial? And as for his point that the Supreme Court doesn’t admit cameras: it should.
Anyway, the coverage of the Simpson trial by Court Television, CNN and even the Entertainment Channel is not what is really bothering Hewitt. He is, to his credit, disgusted by the feeding frenzy elsewhere on the screen and in print. By comparison, the unending courtroom coverage has been sedate (sometimes to the point of somnolence) and often informative.
Does the camera hurt the defendant? Does it help the defendant? Who knows? Does its presence incite lawyers to show off, jurors and witnesses to write books and even the judge to behave as if he were trying out for a series of his own? Perhaps.
But courtroom showboating long preceded television, and the camera can expose pretense and pretension even as it encourages them.
Viewers also must have learned a lot about courtroom rules and procedures, not to mention DNA, hair, shoes and gloves.
And at the very least, the trial’s excesses have raised concerns about the way trials work. “What television has done,” Parker said, “is reveal the problem, not cause the problem.”
Hewitt’s arguments on “Crossfire” left the impression that what upsets him is the thought of millions of people enjoying the Simpson show the way they enjoy the soap operas they might otherwise be watching. “A murder trial,” he declared, “should not be America’s entertainment.”
That criticism–of the audience, not of the show–might equally be applied to a presidential debate.
Mistrust of the audience may be justified, though that is an uncomfortable proposition for the executive producer of so popular a television program to maintain. If you despair of democracy, you might well call for the closing to the people of the people’s courts.
And with or without courtroom coverage, gossip columnists, supermarket sheets, television news magazines and their whole tribe would keep churning away with the help of Kato Kaelin, Faye Resnick & Co.
When he confines himself to skewering such practitioners, Hewitt is as on target as a sharp “60 Minutes” report, and he has drawn blood. Shortly before New York Newsday went out of business, Liz Smith, doyenne gossiper, accused her “longtime pal” of highbrowism, a crime of which, given his decades of successful service in commercial television, he cannot be guilty.
She wrote that she took as a compliment a crack Hewitt made on CNBC that the Simpson case was being reported as if Liz Smith were covering it: “all a bunch of gossip about ice cream melting and his kids and her kids and his mother and her mother.”
But her column was not a thank-you note. She knocked “60 Minutes” for “having ignored one of the major media stories of our time” (an achievement that ought to bring Hewitt an Emmy, considering the fact, as Smith does not fail to point out, that his program’s ratings have lately dipped).
What, in Smith’s view, makes the Simpson extravaganza a major story? She tells all: “A majority of Americans continue to want to know about it and to watch it and wait for the outcome.”
That’s the overriding measure of importance in her calling. She gives a dutiful nod to “urgent issues of race, spousal abuse, evidence gathering, evidence tampering and the giving of testimony,” but it is no secret that the case’s attraction has much more to do with celebrity, sex and bloody bodies, just like any gossip column’s attraction. How many people read Smith’s column or tune to “Hard Copy” for lessons in the rules of evidence?
There is something a little poignant and almost redeeming about Smith’s boast of having done “important stories” on the Simpson affair. It’s like Diane Sawyer interrupting her tawdry “Prime Time Live” interview with Michael Jackson and wife to announce that she is a serious journalist.
Alas, these disrespected, unembarrassable media queens and kings can’t have everything along with fame and money. But here’s a small, hopeless suggestion for those who would be taken seriously outside their own club: Leave the Simpson case to the camera in the courtroom.
