The Trial Wasn’t Televised: As Trump & Allies Claim A “Rigged” Process, There’s A Greater Case For Cameras In The Court – Analysis
The day after a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts, Donald Trump accelerated his attacks on the judge in the trial, Juan Merchan, calling him “a devil.”
That was just the latest rhetoric Trump has used against the jurist — superlatives that would make you think that Merchan was a mix of Pontius Pilate and Mills Lane.
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In fact, many journalists who covered the trial say that he was stern, even-keeled and professional.
But it will be difficult for the public to see for themselves how the judge acted. The Trump trial was not allowed to be televised or broadcast in any way, despite the stakes and the historical importance, and despite the rather predictable post-verdict battle to define exactly what happened in the courtroom.
As one prominent correspondent put it, “There is no visual record of what is going on. People can fill in the blanks.”
New York courts generally prohibit cameras in the courtroom and, save for short moments when still photographers were allowed to take shots of Trump before each day’s proceedings began, there was little deviation from the restrictions.
Journalists instead clattered away with close-to-real-time texts and tweets of what was transpiring in the courtroom, with cable news networks dividing their screens with scroll of the developments. The court itself posted transcripts each day.
But advocates for cameras, along with plenty in the media, say that such comprehensive coverage was still no replacement for witnessing the nuance, vocal inflections and tone coming from the courtroom. One claim from some commentators on the right — that the judge sustained no objections from Trump’s attorneys through the course of the trial — could have been more easily refuted.
Anchors at times made sure to remind viewers of the prohibition on televised coverage for such a historic event. Moments after the verdict was read, CNN’s Jake Tapper told viewers, “We do not have cameras in the courtroom because New York still thinks it is the year 1732.”
NBC News correspondent and MSNBC anchor Katy Tur, who was inside the courtroom when the verdict was read, said that as much as reporters captured the tone and mood of the proceedings, “it doesn’t get to what it was really like inside that courtroom.”
“It’s harder to assign nefarious purpose when you see someone’s face, you see how they are behaving in court,” she said. “It’s hard to say that the judge was biased and the judge had it out for Donald Trump when you could see with your own eyes the way that Judge Juan Merchan conducted himself in court, the way that he sat over the trial.”
She said that she found Merchan’s manner to be “so respectful and so professional.”
“It would be valuable for the American public to see it so that when they are getting spun by whoever’s trying to tell them that the court system is rigged that they can have actual hard evidence of the way the trial worked,” Tur said.
Technically, there were cameras in the courtroom, but for the purpose of providing a closed-circuit feed of the proceedings to an overflow room of reporters.
CBS News’ chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa, who also was at the Manhattan courthouse through the trial, said that “it would have been better in some respects for the audience to have the same access to the feed that the journalists did. I’m always a proponent of providing more information to people about public affairs. But the court did not allow the feed to go out to the public.”
What that meant, he said, is that it was even more important for reporters to take detailed notes and provide accurate reporting, “these old school things come to the fore now as vital for this campaign and for American democracy. … Now as the trial fades into the distance, it’s going to be more important for journalists who covered it every day, like we did at CBS, to be vigilant in reminding people about exactly what happened, especially if there are points of the trial that become contentious.”
As an example, Costa cited one of the more dramatic moments, when defense witness Bob Costello irritated Merchan. When the judge sustained the prosecution’s objections, Merchan called out Costello for adding verbal and visual sarcastic asides. Merchan stopped the proceedings, dismissed the jury and at one point cleared the courtroom to warn Costello that his behavior was “contemptuous.”
When that happened, Costa said, “There’s a nuance in how you describe it and there’s a nuance in how you report it. This wasn’t a professional wrestling episode. This was a tense moment in a courtroom in lower Manhattan. There’s a difference there in terms of the theatrical value of it, and at the end of the day, what’s important is the substance of the moment, which was pretty meaningless in the scope of the trial.”
University of Utah Law Professor RonNell Andersen Jones praised the “creative solutions” that reporters turned to in covering the proceedings, along with much of the legal analysis..
“The press corps seems to appreciate that it has to try to paint a richer picture of this first-of-its-kind trial,” she wrote via email. “But in a divisive time, when there are so few shared sources of trusted news, this inevitably leads to competing narratives and intra-media battles about even the basic characterization of some courtroom facts.”
She noted that cameras also may have helped the public decide for themselves on claims made by Trump’s detractors — that he was sleeping at many points during the proceedings — or if the former president merely had his eyes closed. (That said, televised coverage wouldn’t make any difference for the spread of another claim, a rumor of Trump’s gaseousness).
“If we’d heard some of the testimony for ourselves, we could have drawn our own conclusions about whether the witnesses sounded credible or trial participants showed disrespect for the proceedings,” Andersen Jones wrote. “We would have had a sense of the defendant in his role as defendant, beyond the press-conference format outside the courtroom that came to dominate much of the news.”
A rationale for restricting camera access continues to be that the Trump trial may very well have become too sensationalized and too much of a circus. The specter of the O.J. Simpson trial, which became a daily soap opera for much of the viewing public and late night fodder for talk show hosts, still lingers 30 years later.
There is still the judicial mindset that those involved will play for the cameras — a not-too-far-fetched worry given some of the players involved in the Trump case — and campaigns certainly would have seized certain moments for commercial spots for questionable context. Witnesses could face a backlash in a highly polarized environment. A judge’s worry is always that a juror would be identified, or that the presence of cameras would somehow present an unpredictable variable to skew their decision.
Advocates for cameras, however, say that there is enough experience with cameras in courtrooms that judges have learned how to curb and avoid disruptions, while technology has improved to make the presence of television less intrusive. The Minnesota judge presiding over Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd allowed for camera access but audio only for those testifying.
Prohibiting cameras “really takes away a great opportunity for the public to see and hear what is happening and to see that the process is more than fair,” said Theodore Boutrous Jr., the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner who is among the attorneys representing media outlets as they seek camera coverage of Trump’s D.C. trial on charges that he conspired to remain in power after the 2020 election. Those proceedings are on hold as the Supreme Court decides whether Trump had presidential immunity.
Boutrous noted that federal appellate courts allow for cameras for oral arguments, while the Supreme Court features live audio.
During the Trump hush money trial proceedings, the visuals that much of the public saw were courtroom drawings and the regular statements made by the former president in the courthouse hallway. Trump seemed to relish the chance to rail against the proceedings multiple times during the day, as prosecutors declined to provide a counter argument. That left him to claim that Merchan’s gag order unfairly restricted his free speech rights; a number of legal commentators, however, said that the judge showed restraint in merely fining Trump as he ruled that he violated the restrictions 10 different times.
Televised coverage, Boutrous said, “would not only defeat the misinformation about how the trial proceeded, but it would allow people to see how the justice system worked.”
The stakes are even higher for the former president’s January 6th case, with the issues having to do not with falsified business records but American democracy. Trump’s team has supported allowing televised coverage “in order to ensure that the American public can see the bare truth of this case”; prosecutors warn that it was Trump’s effort to “try his case in the court of public opinion” and would turn the proceedings into “a media event.” The latter is likely, cameras or not.
With a long tradition in federal district courts against the broadcasting proceedings, there’s every reason to expect that the next Trump show won’t be televised.
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