Peterson Verdict In, Another Media Circus Winds Down

Clear away the ceaseless media rigmarole of the past 5 months, and the State of California v. Scott Peterson is nothing more than your run of the mill domestic homicide case prosecuted on circumstantial evidence. However, as your friendly neighborhood media jackals at CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and COURTTV have succeeded in bringing to town a circus that would have made proud papas of both Barnum and Bailey, digital rubbernecks across this nation have continuously and hypnotically cleared brush on the path to their own mental obesity, consuming one fast food sound nugget after another, digesting each episode of the battle of the network talking heads, and of course, eagerly awaiting each bombshell du jour. To be fair, there was somewhat of a prisoner’s dilemma for journalists. One the one hand, the trappings of a highly rated Lifetime movie did exist. Sex, infidelity, murder, you name it. On the other hand, for all the Shakespearean notions, much of the day-to-day trial was more like a day spent in an elevator minus the Muzak. Such is inherently bad for advertising dollars. In this Darwinian age of digitized obsolescence, the 24-hour news networks lust for sticky eyeballs is insatiable. The problem is that the trial, like any other criminal jury trial, often produced nothing more than cold logic, mundane details, and abstract rules. So, as a trial sets forth one piece of dispassionate minutia after another, each media outlet must take these morsels and reconstitute them in a fashion more suitable for tomorrow’s water cooler analysis. In turn, the competition amongst the media players drives a hyperbolic freak show that leads to a critical mass of distortion and oversimplification that has become the mainstay for our deep fried media culture. In this case, if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that a pregnant woman and her unborn child were actually and savagely murdered, we could simply justify the hype and glitz as mere entertainment. Good television. But we cannot and should not because the tragedy is real. The pain and suffering for the friends and family members is also real and it does not go away with a click of the remote. It remains forever. We, the general public are also damaged, surreptitiously, as a bedrock institution of our society erodes one highly publicized trial at a time. The effectiveness of the American criminal justice system depends upon its legitimacy in the eyes of the public. It depends upon the public's trust and belief that a trial is ultimately and simply, a search for the truth. When the media treats it like the bearded lady, the public loses confidence in our courts as a serious and solemn place where real justice is really done. At the same time, you can be sure that if we didn’t like candy apples and cotton candy, those items would not be sold a