(3089/898) Guilty

1599) Our communal and civic open spaces - courts, workplaces, Congress, Academe, the media - are no longer places where issues are settled, but battlegrounds on which the most pressing conflicts will never be resolved. America is no longer one nation indivisible, if it ever was, but a land peoples by many bitterly divided tribes.

While we still come together under the aegis of public institutions to thrash out our shared values, laws, and understandings, the notion of an America united by common views of attainable equality, justice and individual freedom is a myth.

Jon Katz
"Guilty"
Wired (9/1995)

1600) The role of modern journalism as a mechanism for meaningful cultural debate is a great hoax, exposed by Orenthal James Simpson and the spectacle he's provoked in LA.

Jon Katz
"Guilty"
Wired (9/1995)

1601) [A] jury no longer does what it was meant to do (function as the true conscience of the community) but represents those parts of the community, those tribes, to which individual jurors belong.

Jon Katz
"Guilty"
Wired (9/1995)

1602) Cultural isolation might have been possible when news consisted of a daily paper, a weekly magazine, or a newscast. But news channels are now on 24 hours a day, and there are nearly 1,000 radio talk shows. There is no way to isolate a juror or anyone else from the pervasive media and their chorus of messages. Nor is there any reason to. Either potential jurors are forced to pretend they live in a cocoon, or they really do live in cocoons that poorly prepare them for their roles of deciding enormously complex issues.

But the more you know about law in general or about a case in particular, say author Wendy Kaminer, the less likely you are to wind up on a jury. Litigators, she points out, don't seek objective, unbiased jurors: they want biased ones - people their believe will favor their cases. And concern over pretrial publicity, Kaminer says, favors uninformed over informed jurors.

Jon Katz
"Guilty"
Wired (9/1995)

1603) For better or worse, great stories have always transformed the media that cover them and the institutions they cover. Walter Cronkite's coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing were broadcast journalism's twin high-water marks, legitimizing TV news as the country's most pervasive news medium. Watergate brought the press into its ongoing age of antagonism and self-righteousness, as reporters entered the personal and sexual lives of public figures. The death of Elvis sparked a booming new tabloid news culture that's become a permanent part of our information structure. The Northridge, California, earthquake, reported first on Prodigy via wireless modem, made online communications a news medium in the traditional sense of the term. [...]

But if great stories transform media, they also systematically shake our belief in institutions. Watergate and Vietnam eroded the credibility of the military and the presidency. The dramas of Anita Hill and Rodney King discredited Congress and the police. The Simpson trial has done the same for criminal justice and mass media. Story by story, our civic hearts seem broken, our faith shattered. For a generation, media mythologized our most important institutions - the FBI, the government, the judicial system. Then we learned shocking, revelatory new truths about the way our civil service machinery works, and we were totally unprepared for the idea that it doesn't always work. No wonder why we puzzle over why we are so angry and disconnected. We are given so little truth most of the time, reality seems unbearable when we are finally confronted with it.

Jon Katz
"Guilty"
Wired (9/1995)

1604) If one tenet of our age is that information wants to be free, its companion is that media wants to tell the truth. Neither information nor media get what they want much of the time; this is one of the great ironies of the information revolution and the sad legacy of the O.J. Simpson trial.

Jon Katz
"Guilty"
Wired (9/1995)