At Camp Jackson, Rumors Fly as Media Await Verdict

Verdict watch, Day Five.

More than 2,100 journalists from 34 countries milled around the courthouse parking lot, schmoozing, flirting, griping about their bosses and pouncing on anything that looked even a little bit like news about Michael Jackson’s child-molestation trial.

Is it true that the jurors are deadlocked? If not, will a helicopter swoop onto the ball field next door to carry Jackson off after the verdict? Has his mother suffered a stroke?

No, no and no, various officials wearily responded. Nobody knows what’s going on in the jury room. Choppers don’t land in city parks. Katherine Jackson is fine, and her son’s hospital visit late Wednesday night in nearby Solvang was a “routine” follow-up to previous back treatments, said his spokeswoman, Raymone Bain.

But fresh rumors travel fast through the tents of the media bazaar, especially on a day like Thursday, when the Santa Barbara County Superior Court jurors, without reaching a decision, knocked off for the afternoon so some of them could attend school graduations.

Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy at his Neverland ranch near Los Olivos in 2003.

A news vacuum is something reporters abhor at any time. At the Jackson trial, though, it’s worse, with so many journalists in so small a space looking so hard for something to say. With no indoor offices at the courthouse, the media are camped in the nearly treeless parking lot. Many are separated by only a canvas-covered fence from a patio outside the room where jurors deliberate.

During their breaks, jurors can smoke on the patio, buffered from the media din by music wafting from a portable player. They may or may not realize how intensely the world’s press, just yards away, is thinking of them.

Each morning, a crowd of reporters peers through a cordon of sheriff’s deputies as jurors step out of the two rented white vans that bring them to the courthouse. Canny veterans of high-profile trials, the journalists are looking for jackets, ties, newly done hair, stylish pantsuits. The idea is that jurors on the verge of a verdict dress better than usual, knowing they’ll be on global TV before the day is out.

One morning this week, the buzz around the parking lot was that the jurors were unusually spiffed up. With the flip of a cellphone, reporters alerted editors the world over that this could be verdict day. As the rumor instantaneously mushroomed, the jurors might as well have been attired in black suits and bowler hats.

Wait -- someone else is telling us that some of the jurors were wearing jeans but that their shirts were neatly tucked in. What do you make of it? the journalists wondered.

The answer is, obviously, not much, said Associated Press radio reporter Warren Levinson, who tried to convey a sense of skeptical detachment when broadcasting a tidbit about the dress-for-success jury.

“You can’t completely ignore these things,” he said later. “They’re part of the scene.”

So, too, are the rumors about planned attacks on the media if Jackson is convicted.

This week, Santa Maria police officers seized a few pine cones that were being used to hold fans’ posters on the ground when the afternoon wind kicked up. They could be used as missiles, the disappointed fans were told.

As in a huge game of “telephone,” the pine cones became metal pipes in minutes.

The reality is that the day before the pine-cone confiscation, officers found several sacks of rocks that they believed could be hurled by angry fans toward reporters they detest. Other rocks were found with “cute little messages” for the media, said Santa Maria Police Chief Danny R. Macagni.

“We’re not allowing the fans to have any rocks,” he said. “We’re being cautious -- not overly officious but just cautious.”

By Thursday morning, media coordinator Peter Shaplen was all too familiar with the sometimes futile mission of rumor control. Striding amid dozens of reporters noodling on their laptops in folding chairs, he announced that a fire engine and an ambulance speeding up to the courthouse had nothing to do with the Jackson trial.

“Just so you know,” he said.