Media:
McConnell, Frank
Media FRANK McCONNELL THE TRIALS OF TELEVISION THE McMARTIN CASE In America in January 1990, the words in fact have very little, or a very specialized, meaning. Here in California, the McMartin...
...It's all so damned telegenic...
...Why all this bother now...
...The parents and the kids-who may or may not have been coached to lie-are hurt and outraged that the jury didn't believe them...
...Lawrence, "Why do men go to war...
...But the speed of light is not normal speed, and that is the speed at which information now moves, and information, in any society, is action...
...The point is that our judicial system, dating at least from the consolidation of English Common Law in the sixteenth century, and our electoral system, dating from the eighteenth, are both near-perfect mechanisms designed for people moving at normal speed...
...But the TV is more interested in the reactions of the parents of the supposedly abused kids, and of the kids themselves, now seven years older than their alleged fondling, and of the L.A...
...And bringing the War into America's living rooms-showing, nightly, its obscenity-was a major factor in making the war unpopular...
...If that is so, then the McMartin Trial is the first TV Trial, but in a very different sense...
...Driving away from the courthouse, Peggy signals for her chauffeur to stop and gives a brief, wimpy interview-she wasn't raised to be bitter, she says, despite the fact that her life, her livelihood, and her reputation have been irreversibly savaged-and drives on...
...Or, put another way, does invincible ignorance of the most powerful public information system ever devised qualify you for one of the most weighty duties of citizenship...
...Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son Raymond Buckey-who has done five years in jail during this trial-are on the street...
...And his profound reply was, "Because the women are watching...
...Two-and-a-half years, $15 million court costs, and the last two defendants out of the original seven have been found not guilty of scores of charges of child molestation, satanism, animal sacrifice, and enforced child pornography...
...In doing so, it made it virtually impossible to discover the "facts" of the case...
...I am a mystery writer, so I want to ask who-after the McMartin staff, parents, and children-might be the next victims...
...Well, you know, because the cameras are rolling...
...Out of sheer careerism, the DAs turned the case into an overlong, overpriced, and badly staged goon show...
...Sort of...
...Remember how hard it was to find unprejudiced jurors for the trial of Oliver North...
...But in this instance, the Tube-the whole baroque mechanism of information-gathering and dissemination intruded upon the reality of the alleged crimes and, let's face it, shaped that reality...
...Today-a newspaper that wants to be a TV show-carried, on its cover, not news of the invasion, but the results of a poll as to how many Panamanians approved of the invasion...
...To say that all this is simply awful would be as silly as for an ancient Babylonian to mourn the invention of writing...
...The kids were fondled and raped or they were not...
...We are, I think, at a fairly serious impasse, and one that not even our best science-fiction writers predicted...
...The technology is here, and technology is never reversible...
...Two days after George Bush invaded Panama, U.S.A...
...The defendants are either unholy monsters or they are not...
...This may be a measure of how much, in the last twenty years, TV itself has come to be the central reality of our lives...
...And there are other people to interview: now the members of the jury can actually be on TV, and then we can interview defendants in child-molestation cases from the Midwest, and...
...They spent the next two years swallowing cold crow because nobody, it appears, in Manhattan Beach, California, knows the rules of evidence...
...But we can ask questions...
...Our technology has outstripped-by 186,000 miles per second, as a matter of fact-our ethics, and even our laboriously constructed ethical systems...
...County prosecutors, the only certain guilty parties in the whole case...
...The prosecutors-you can always identify the fools in a classical drama-have made it impossible, at the cost of several Stealth bombers, to decide what, if anything, happened-or whom it happened to, or why or when or by whom...
...The DA's people angrily holler "mistrial" and, before the cameras, label Peggy and Ray with the guilt they couldn't label them with in court...
...In the first instance, the Tube brought a brutal reality into the American consciousness, and in doing so helped change that consciousness...
...It's on all the networks, all the local news...
...After a fiasco like that, you want to ask, why doesn't everybody just go home...
...Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said, or as you might say-and probably did-watching all this unfold...
...But I am not a science-fiction writer, so I don't pursue such questions...
...Finally there were no facts, only images: well-groomed reporters detailing, with straight faces, allegations (leaked by-somebody) of satan-worship, cannibalism, and necrophilia performed in broad daylight in a preschool in one of the fashionable neighborhoods of L.A...
...That good and gifted man, Marshall McLuhan, predicted in the sixties that TV could transform the world into the brotherhood of a "global village...
...Saints, hermits, or liars, in other words...
...After two presidents who rely on opinion polls and ratings more than on the art of government, will we finally revise our electoral and judicial process into decision-by-telethon...
...And is this a jury of North's "peers...
...But who could have thought that the name of the village would turn out to be Salem...
...Someone once asked T.E...
...Only those who had not seen TV reports on North's Senate hearings qualified as "unprejudiced...
...Everybody is bitter...
...Shaped it to the requirements of a consciousness already formed by the breathless sensationalism of Geraldo, Oprah, and Phil...
...Vietnam, we've all heard and accepted by now, was the first TV War...
...Here in California, the McMartin Preschool trial is over...
...Early on they had leaked details to the press that Stephen King, for crying out loud, would have trouble making believable...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 6
