(Opinion) Which is likely to be more educational, the vivid televised details of senate hearings on the extent of organized crime’s influence on American society, or a couple of school civics lessons?
I’m putting my thumb on the scale to opt for real, reality TV.
How can you beat a cast of real-life characters, including crime boss Frank Costello, west coast mobster and “Bugsy” Siegel associate Mickey Cohen; Virginia Hill, the gang’s moll, and Greasy Thumb Guzak, a mob hitman?
It was the beginning of the 1950s, and I’ll never forget sneaking out of school to sit, transfixed, before the black and white TV screen as the juicy details of the mob’s activities came rolling in.
The Kefauver hearings, as they came to be known after the name of the ranking senator, opened a window onto organized crime and the government’s efforts to understand and prevent it.
As described by ‘Life’ magazine: “People had suddenly gone indoors into living rooms, taverns, and clubrooms, auditoriums, and back-offices.
In the eerie half-light, looking at millions of small frosty screens, people sat there as if charmed. Never before had the nation’s attention been completely riveted on a single matter.”
It is obvious that it was an unforgettable civics lesson for the more than 30 million people who watched.
The hearings helped raise public awareness of the need to combat organized crime and influenced subsequent law enforcement efforts against these criminal organizations.
We all remember Watergate in 1972.
These hearings aimed to uncover the truth behind the Watergate break-in, as well as to determine if there was any involvement of the Nixon administration in attempting to cover up the break-in and other illegal activities related to it.
This led to a significant public outcry and eventually to the resignation of President Nixon.
Watergate is a significant event in U.S. history. Without the TV coverage its lessons might not have remained in the national consciousness.
TV has that effect.
It has the power to engage us in our history, strip from the action all the talking heads and thirty-second experts, and let us see history unraveling before our eyes.
Nothing could be better.
The founders imagined all courtrooms with sufficient public seating to fulfill the Constitution’s guarantees of citizens’ right to a public trial.
It’s doubtful they imagined today’s populations, but if they did, and if they could have imagined television, they would certainly have applauded it.
If the Kefauver hearings ‘riveted so completely’ the nation’s attention, could that be an understated preview of the audience ready to watch the Trump election conspiracy trial, guaranteed to be the trial of a lifetime, a live piece of American history now scheduled to begin on January second, 2024, but likely to be delayed.
As things stand now, it won’t be broadcast at all.
Unless the defendant, the prosecution, and media companies prevail against long-established federal court rules prohibiting any cameras or recording devices in Federal criminal courtrooms, there will be no TV.
That would be a disservice to the nation.
There is no disputing that we are at a critical inflection point as a nation, largely unwilling to hear the other side of the red/blue debate, living in our private social media echo chambers, and clamped to TV outlets that feed us what they know we want to hear, all the better to offer advertisers the audiences they wish to reach.
Whatever way it is decided, this momentous conspiracy case deserves to become part of the fabric of our citizenship.
It can only do that if it can be watched unvarnished and unedited, live as if the viewer had one of the founder’s seats in the courtroom and can see and hear what the jury sees and hears.
Then we can weigh the truth and arrive at our verdict.
“Jurors said that after sitting on juries, they were surprised by how much more favorably they thought of our justice system” wrote Steven Brill, founder of Court TV and a longtime observer of the judicial process.
“When they got to see the system up close and at full length — instead of how it was displayed on the 11 o’clock news with sound-bite spins from lawyers on the courthouse steps or prosecutors at a news conference — they decided it worked well.
That it did a good job of sorting out the truth.
More than one juror told me that we should all be proud of it.”
That’s a far cry from the merely 29 percent of Americans whom Gallup recently discovered “have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the criminal justice system.
NPR predicts the conspiracy trial would likely prove among the biggest television events in history.
It would certainly serve to give citizens an unforgettable civics lesson.
There is something about the mood and majesty of a courtroom that compels observers to minimize preconceptions and prejudices.
Wrote women’s rights activist Patricia Ireland, “A courtroom is a quiet place, but there’s no place in a democracy where you can better keep an eye on the workings of that democracy than in a courtroom.”
TV or not TV? I’m for TV.
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