First of all, about the verdict: I had a college professor teaching me about journalism and the law who told me that the most underrated part of a trial is the jury. Ordinary American citizens, the oft-cited "jury of your peers," really do take their jobs seriously, he said, and he fully believed that take their time seeking out the truth and thinking about whether the evidence presented proved, beyond a reasonable doubt (another oft-cited American aphorism) if the person on trial is guilty.
Being a distracted observer, I believe that the jurors came to the conclusion that there was no proof there that Casey Anthony did indeed murder her daughter, Caylee. They had circumstantial evidence up the wazoo, but no smoking gun. And if 12 people are going to find her guilty and subject her to the possibility of killing her, they needed to make damn sure. They weren't sure. And I can see that.
Now, is that bitch Casey guilty of something? Absolutely -- and this is where I feel my bloodlust outweigh my loyalty to the Constitution. She did something -- or nothing -- that led to her daughter's death. It's the same postulate that led some people to suspect that Claus von Bülow "had a hand" in helping his wife, Sunny, slip into a coma. Anthony probably can't be found guilty of murder. But goddamn, she did something that caused the death of Caylee. And that's why a part of me wanted the jury to nail her to the wall for something, even if it would certainly be overturned on appeal.
It is that need for justice, rough yet illegal, that I saw on display in the coverage of the Casey Anthony murder trial. But the thing I got out of this is the suddeness of the saturation on broadcast television news. It looks as if free TV largely ignored this case until the beginning of Independence Weekend, and from then on I was fucking bombarded by that tramp and that cute picture of her dead kid.
People say Casey Anthony is this generation's O.J. Simpson. It's not. No one could match O.J. Simpson, and no one ever will. In this age of cable news and the 24/7 news cycle, anything noteworthy will be replayed ad nauseum somewhere, so the entire focus of a salacious story, where we all see it from its origin through its gestation to its culmination, just won't be there.
However, this Anthony case was largely a product of cable news. I don't have cable, and so there was a good chance I never would have even heard of this babe until the broadcast networks started covering it over a week ago. I know about this case largely because when I was working out at the gym I would flip the channels and see that Headline News' Nancy Grace made it a topic of her hour-long show for months. She succeeded in making other cable news networks and syndicated programs cover it, and the lurid details and the conventions on what makes a good broadcast journalism story (hot girl gone bad, fucked-up family, a cute kid that deserves justice) took it from there.
What finally brought this case and trial to the mainstream probably were two things, both of them benign and yet at the heart of the troubles of maintaining a broadcast journalism enterprise: Newsrooms were heading into a slow holiday weekend, and there was nothing else to cover. They had the time, the money and the means (or at least an affiliate who could cover it for them), and such non-national stories get ratings, so what the hell? I'm just still surprised that it's as if all three broadcast networks made a pledge to flood the city of Orlando with cameras, and saturate their half-hour show with this shit.
Sadly, after the not guilty verdict, the aftermatch specials were the kind of slanted, baiting pieces of shit "news" shows that forced me out of TV news. What was needed was to tell people who wanted blood why Casey Anthony is about to walk away free. Those people need to be reminded of innocent until proven guilty. In other words, they needed to be reminded of how the Constitution works. Instead, we got news reporters who made sure they were on camera when they asked loaded questions that were basically a variation of, "What the fuck were you thinking, letting that cunt walk away free?!"
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