Cable TV’s crystal balls get cracked

If you hang around a courthouse long enough, one of the things you learn is that people willing to predict a jury’s verdict are the sort who take stock tips from their barbers.

These days, however, the news organizations most preoccupied with sensational trials are the cable television news outlets, and they are creatures of appetite rather than principle or even brute experience. Their sets may be crammed with more lawyers and shrinks than a Beverly Hills office building, but the constant references to their alleged expertise notwithstanding, they’re basically there as shills to lure more suckers into the tent.

Now, as any psychic with a 900 number can tell you, there’s nothing people want to know more than the unknowable -- and they’ll pay to get it. So predicting verdicts now is a staple of the cable news organizations’ trial coverage.

Thus, the broadcast farce in the 90 speculative minutes preceding Michael Jackson’s acquittal in Santa Maria Monday.

On Court TV, which routinely uses everything but card stunts to cheer on the prosecution in whatever case it’s covering, those onetime prosecutors turned Valkyrie anchors, Nancy Grace and Kimberly Guilfoyle, unhesitatingly predicted conviction.

Over on CNN -- that’s big CNN, the one that’s still mostly respectable -- defense attorney Robert Shapiro flatly stated, “He’s going to be convicted.” (Of course, he also thought O.J. Simpson was going to be convicted -- and Simpson was Shapiro’s client.)

Meanwhile, the analysts on MSNBC hedged their bets a bit by parsing the various combinations of conviction and acquittal Jackson might receive.

No equivocation at Fox, though, where former prosecutor Wendy Murphy confidently predicted “there is no question we will see convictions here.”

So what happened when Jackson was acquitted on all counts? Red faces? Second thoughts? A little soul-searching, perhaps? Maybe one expression of regret for the rush to judgment?

Naaawww.

The reaction, instead, was rage liberally laced with contempt and the odd puzzled expression. Its targets were the jurors.

No more solemn on-air pieties about jury service as citizenship’s highest calling. Oh no, hell hath no fury like a cable anchor held up for scorn.

“Not guilty by reason of celebrity,” shrieked Court TV’s Guilfoyle.

“Pretty amazing stuff,” sighed her colleague Catherine Crier.

“We need IQ tests for jurors,” snarled Fox’s Murphy, who also promptly dubbed Jackson, “the Teflon molester.”

Pressuring a juror

Later that night, Grace moved over to CNN Headline News and introduced her hour-long prime-time indictment of the jurors. By then, of course, Grace had the jurors’ own press conference to pick over.

“I’m glad they made friends with each other,” she sneered. “Michael Jackson walks free, though.”

During a discussion of one juror’s remarks, Grace’s guest, psychoanalyst Bethany Marshall, interjected, “This is a woman who has no life. She is like a stalker.”

Really?

Surely it’s only a matter of time until one of these managed-care outfits hires away the remarkable group of psychiatrists and psychologists cable news has recruited. What better way to hold down medical costs than to employ therapists with the ability to diagnose people they’ve never met -- from 3,000 miles away.

But Grace reserved her particular scorn for Paul Rodriguez, the retired school counselor who was elected the jury’s foreman. As he patiently attempted to explain how he and his fellow jurors had been unable to overcome their reasonable doubts about the charges against Jackson, this exchange ensued:

GRACE: Yes. Mr. Rodriguez, I understand the theory of reasonable doubt. I was a prosecutor many years. But before I let you go, I got a question for you. What do you think Jackson, Michael Jackson, a 40-year-old man, was doing with these little boys all those nights in bed alone?

RODRIGUEZ: Well, that’s a personal view that I don’t want to talk about right now.

GRACE: No, sir!

RODRIGUEZ: We all have our thoughts ...

GRACE: You tried him -- you tried him for that. He was tried. You were on his jury. That’s what he was accused of. What do you think he was doing?

RODRIGUEZ: I know. And that’s why I say we -- we had to just rely on the.... I’m not going to stick my neck out there on this.... I’m going to base it again on the testimony that was presented to us ...

GRACE: Well, what do you mean, stick your neck out?

RODRIGUEZ: There was too much reasonable doubt.

GRACE: What do you mean, stick your neck out?

RODRIGUEZ: Well ...

GRACE: You don’t want to say what you thought Jackson was doing with those little boys every night?

RODRIGUEZ: Because it’s our ... personal beliefs and our own thoughts, and that’s not what we have to work with. We had to work with the testimony of the witnesses and the credibility of the witnesses, and that’s all we can base it on.

GRACE: So what you believe -- you’re telling me what you believe doesn’t matter.

RODRIGUEZ: Yes. It does matter, but I’m not going to go any further with that.

GRACE: Yes, sir. I think you’ve gone far enough. With me ...

Getting the last word is the cable bullies’ stock in trade, but there is something particularly repellent about watching a conscientious juror, who clearly honored his oath to put personal views aside and decide the case according to evidence and law, abused for the sake of what the show’s producers doubtless regarded as “great TV.”

There is something larger here than civility, or even the issue of the damage done when news organizations abandon the standards of ethical journalism wholesale for the sake of their commercial advantage. What’s really at issue here is that the way the cable news operations have elected to conduct their business threatens the integrity of the jury system itself.

Anybody who does not sit through every day of every witness’ testimony in a trial really cannot have an opinion worth hearing. Even then, only those who consider that testimony with the ears of a juror mindful of their oath and attentive to the trial judge’s instructions can speak with real authority. Everything else is blather -- entertaining blather, perhaps, but dangerous, too.

We invest the jury’s awesome power in 12 ordinary people because it is the ultimate exercise of our democracy’s popular sovereignty. In those things that matter most, we only trust each other.

If jurors who conscientiously fulfill their oath -- as Jackson’s did -- then are subjected to contempt and abuse for contradicting the self-interested sentiments of an electronic mob, then who among us is safe?