TV review: Trial by Media, Netflix (2020)

This entertaining show deals with a range of events. Episode 1, ‘Talk Show Murder’, is about daytime talk shows and how “gotcha” journalism can have unwonted effects. But the role of the media in ep 2, ‘Subway Vigilante’, and ep 3, ’41 Shots’ – about shootings and the court cases that followed them – is at issue mainly because Bernhard Goetz (the “vigilante” in ep 2) and Amadou Diallo (the victim of police excess in ep 3) were widely discussed by the community. 

I’m not an expert in the laws of any US states, or of law that operates federally in that country, and even in the case of Australia, where I live, there are details about the legal process that are beyond my ken, but though this show is interesting – each episode a snapshot of America’s public sphere at a specific point in time, from the 80s and 90s to the noughts and the teens – I felt like the label at the top was employed a tad promiscuously. 

Each ep deals with different issues and, similarly, the way an expression like “trial by media” is used might, depending on the jurisdiction you live in, differ according to custom and habit. What I think about when I read these words is not necessarily the same as the meaning the filmmakers had in mind when they picked them to attach to their productions. For me, the expression “trial by media” refers to unwarranted (and, sometimes, illegal) exposure of facts salient to a court case that prejudices a jury, making the enactment of justice difficult or impossible. In the court cases featured in eps 2 and 3, the judge’s ability to find an untainted jury was indeed compromised, as it was in the case in ep 5, ‘Big Dan’s’, which followed a 1983 rape in New Haven, Massachusetts. 

But merely having trouble finding an untainted jury – something that is unremarkable – doesn’t automatically mean that there has been “trial by media”. While in all cases examined by the filmmakers stories communicated by the media operated on the minds of people – including jurors – in some cases, the defendant’s notoriety worked in his favour. This was true for Richard Scrushy, the CEO of a health insurance company, who was tried for fraud in his home state of Alabama; his case is dealt in ep 4, ‘King Richard’. This wasn’t always true of the case in the final ep, ‘Blago!’. Here, at times the media worked against the interests of the defendant, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, and at times it worked in his favour. 

Open justice – the idea that justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done – is the main thing at issue in all of the eps. The case shown in ep 5 – where the judge let broadcast media into the courtroom – is an extreme one, demonstrating that the legal process can materially suffer from too much exposure, depending on the degree to which it occurs. On the other hand constitutional protections in the US privilege the media in the legal process.

You might build, in your mind, reservations about such freedoms if you take the stories in this series to heart. While in recent years, “fake news” has become a watchword everywhere, this show demonstrates that the media has always operated in a contested space, and is often subjected to intense scrutiny by parts of the community. Perhaps this is what the filmmakers were trying to communicate by choosing the title they used to bind these stories together (it is often the media that is on trial). It’s a puzzle, though just putting the words “trial” and “media” together in the same clause brings to the fore certain ideas. 

There is plenty of drama especially if, like me, you are not American and have little memory of the stories told. The show in fact reflects a degree of parochialism; events are framed in ways that an American will understand but sometimes there is an elephant in the room. For example, discussions of ethnicity appear in eps 2, 3, and 5 but a more important issue struck me: in the first three episodes there’s a shooting as a result of which a person dies. Americans seem to find it less challenging to talk about racism than to talk realistically about easy access to firearms.