For some, Jackson verdict is already in

As trials of the century go, Michael Jackson’s is turning out to be a pretty low-key affair.

There are several reasons for that:

Without the soap opera effect created by cameras in the courtroom, trials no longer become the subject of the nation’s casual conversation, as they once did. In our wired world, the majority of Americans apparently find little entertainment value in discussing people and events they haven’t seen for themselves. No eye contact, no obsession seems to be the rule in these matters.

The nature of the charges against the singer makes it distasteful for most people under most circumstances. There are few well-strung-together people willing to engage in a detailed, no-holds-barred discussion of child molestation -- alleged or proved -- even in private, let alone in a public place or social gathering. Moreover, trials involving charges of sex crimes inevitably narrow down to tests of the credibility between accuser and accused. There’s no who-done-it to engage the collective imagination. That’s why so much of the conversation that has attended Jackson’s trial and the jury’s subsequent deliberations has been about his eccentricities, lifestyle or finances. For those so inclined, there’s plenty to talk about there.

Finally, all this “King of Pop” stuff notwithstanding, the fact is that Jackson isn’t that much of a celebrity anymore -- at least not in the United States, where trials of the century long have been a popular blood sport. By Thursday, there were 2,200 members of the working press accredited to cover the events around the Santa Maria courthouse, but they came from 33 countries. These days, Jackson is an international celebrity but more or less a domestic curiosity.

There is one striking difference between, say, the O.J. Simpson case, which set the standard by which these events are judged, and this millennium’s first trial of the century.

Over the last few years, an entire segment of the U.S. news media essentially has elected to pursue its commercial interests by seceding from American journalism. This group includes most of the commentator/personalities on Fox News -- with the notable exception of Greta van Susteren; the prime-time segment of CNN Headline News; and, most particularly, Court TV.

These operations no longer feel constrained by even the minimal requirements of fairness, balance or dispassion required to practice American-style journalism. Instead, they operate as an unapologetic cheering section for the prosecution. They’ve never met a criminal defendant they didn’t want to see slammed -- Michael Jackson prominent among them.

No verdict; no problem.

We already know he’s guilty. Besides, we’re on the side of victims.

If you watched this week’s coverage of the watch on the Jackson jury, you must have lost count of the number of times Nancy Grace -- Court TV’s harpy in chief and the dark star of Headline News -- looked into the camera and, with swimming eyes and quivering lower lip, began a sentence by saying, “As a crime victim myself, I ....”

It is impossible not to know at this point that Grace’s fiance was murdered in the course of a robbery. People are entitled to grieve as they must -- unless, to gloss Wilde’s defense of sexual privacy, they do it in the road and frighten the horses. Then it becomes a public matter. Here, as so often these days, we confront what has become a pornography of pain.

Once you obliterate the boundaries that used to delineate journalism from advocacy, all sorts of other irritating barriers fall as well. Take, for example, the customary prohibition against using your position in the news media to promote personal interests. All this last week, Grace has been using her shows to promote her new book, “Objection,” published this week.

Every one of her shows ended with some sort of plug for it, but the apogee was reached Wednesday. That was the day the book hit the stores and Grace not only discussed her book on both her Court TV and Headline News shows, but also for a full hour on CNN’s top-rated show, “Larry King Live.” You can’t buy that kind of publicity -- unless, of course, you’re engaged in the media equivalent of self-dealing.

Grace also feels free to tell interviewers that she dislikes all defense lawyers and writes that “the Founding Fathers set up our Constitution in a way that allows defense attorneys and defendants to literally get away with murder.”

Take that, Jim Madison, you victim-hating swine.

Still, Grace is hardly alone in availing herself of the opportunities that abound when all boundaries fall and restraints are lifted. These days, Court TV and other news outlets of this sort are filled with lawyers willing to opine on the guilt of defendants whose trials they never witnessed and psychologists and psychiatrists willing to diagnose people they’ve never met.

Friday, Lisa Bloom -- another in Court TV’s apparently endless supply of tough blonds -- told her viewers that a verdict was imminent because she was “wearing my lucky jacket.” If there were doubts about what that verdict would be, they quickly were eliminated as she moved on to interview her special guest, “victims’ rights attorney” Gloria Allred -- who also happens to be Bloom’s mother.

As much of the foregoing suggests, this new appendage to the news media is a fairly blunt instrument; one doesn’t look to its employees for subtle thinking or expressions of higher sentiment -- irony, for example.

But if you’re somehow obliged to pay close attention, there are moments, though -- unconscious, certainly -- that could paste a Nancy Grace-caliber sneer to the face of a plaster saint.

On Friday morning, for example, as the Jackson jury’s deliberations entered their 25th hour and every other source of on-air amusement flagged, Court TV presented a sort of mini-documentary on the Fatty Arbuckle case. Period black-and-white photos and a grim voice-over solemnly described how the silent-era star had been subjected to grossly biased, sensational and, in many cases, false press coverage over his alleged role in the death of a young actress following a weekend drinking party in San Francisco. In large part because of the hue and cry from the gutter press, Arbuckle suffered through two mistrials before a jury finally acquitted him the third time around. In a note submitted as part of their verdict, the jurors felt compelled to say that the defendant had been subjected to “a great injustice” and that they had “exonerated” him because no scrap of evidence had been produced to link him to the alleged crime. (It’s now thought that the victim died of complications from a botched abortion. The prosecution’s chief witness turned out to be a liar and scam artist.)

But despite those conscientious jurors’ best efforts, the documentary concluded, Arbuckle was financially ruined, his movies were banned in theaters across the country and he never really worked again.

“There are compelling parallels” to the Michael Jackson case, mused Court TV’s anchor-at-the moment, Jack Ford.

“Oh yes,” replied Diane Dimond, the network’s correspondent on the scene in Santa Maria, “both men are 46.”

“Fascinating parallels,” chimed in another anchor, because “Fatty Arbuckle in his time was regarded as a freak of nature,” just like Michael Jackson.

You probably could make this sort of thing up, but what’s the point?