The News
“Mean-spirited slander is heartless; quiet discretion accompanies good sense.” -Proverbs 11.12
A couple weeks ago I got a text from my dad in the middle of the day. It was a news story about one of my cases. I looked at it just to see how inaccurate the story was and then went about my day.
It wasn’t till later that night, it hit me…my dad lives in Georgia. And this case…well…it definitely wasn’t worthy of national news. When did it become so easy to get charged with a crime and make the news?
It wasn’t always like this. You used to have to be a Kennedy or an OJ to make the news beyond your neighborhood. Now it seems like every case could end up with some serious publicity. How did this happen? I think looking at my dad’s habits is a good way of understanding…
My dad used to read the paper on the weekends in the morning. He’d watch the news at night after dinner. Now, he reads and watches the news whenever he sits (or stands) somewhere for more than a minute. It seems like everybody does.
When I was a kid, the news used to be on for the 30 minutes before the Fresh Prince of Bell Aire. Now, with our phones, it is on for the couple minutes before everything. You look at it for a minute while you wait for your coffee to brew, 2 minutes before you check out at the grocery store, a quick look before that next meeting, 4 minutes before you finish pumping gas, etc.…
You might not even be looking for news as you scroll through your phone, but you’re gonna see it because somebody is going to post about it. We all know somebody who’s got an opinion on some news story.
The news was once in a finite space at a determined time. Now it’s all the time. And the people making the news need more content to fill this space and time. They need a story to fill that time you are looking at your phone waiting for the water to boil. They know you are more likely to read something new. The more you read, the more advertising space they can sell to mattress stores and car lots and “accident lawyers”.
Luckily for the news people, we live in the Glorious Age of Google and Facebook. Aside from the Algorithms and Analytics, just the fact that a news affiliate in West Palm can text a New York affiliate has allowed rapid transfer of content. They don’t have to ship any film or fly a national crew out to the scene. But they don’t even have to go looking for content. They can just look on social media to see what people are into at any given moment. It is common today for the News to report a story trending on Facebook…not exactly “investigative”.
The Law Enforcement Agencies are now in the Facebook game and they are happy to provide the “content” to the news. I have had several experiences where the cops take a picture of a person immediately after they pull them out of a car and handcuff them face down on the road next to a bag of cocaine or whatever. They post the photo to their public Facebook with a witty law enforcement slogan like “We got em” or “Crime doesn’t pay”. The news people get the Facebook update and there could be a story before the guy (who has a presumption of innocence) is booked. Oddly these are the same departments that are opposed to body cams.
It used to be that, for a national story to break, the story needed some celebrity or historical importance. Now it just needs to be new. Because now-a-days, 5 minutes ago is old news.
For these reasons, I think it’s even more critical for people to find a lawyer who is mindful of the realities of publicity in a criminal case. If you need one, call me. Reality is my specialty.