Justice and modern media

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

In 79 A.D., Mt. Vesuvius erupted burying the city of Pompeii, Italy. This event affords archeologists with a frozen in time look at how people lived 2,000 years ago.

I visited Pompeii in 2005. The docent showed us various features of the ruins, including the brothel and clay figurines that could only be described as pornography.

In the movie, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989), two losers discuss life in ancient Greece with Socrates (pronounced by them as So-Crates).

Democracy and the judiciary are briefly, as you can imagine, not heavily, mentioned.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) was a Canadian philosopher of communications theory who famously said, “The Medium is the Message.”

Less famous but more germane to this column, he said, “All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”

It was not long after the invention of photography that this medium was used for pornography.

Likewise with Thomas Edison’s motion pictures. In the 1950s and '60s, paper manufacturers created the paper which printers and ink manufactures exploited to make the famous centerfolds for Hugh Hefner.

These certainly contain “…artificial perceptions and arbitrary values” (as attested by “My angel is a centerfold” by The J. Geils Band, 1981).

The judicial process has always had its miscarriages. Some point to the Scopes Trial (“The Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tenn., 1925) as the first modern media trial frenzy.

I would direct the reader’s attention to the Sacco and Vanzetti Trial in Massachusetts in 1921 and suggest it holds this dubious honor (this was a year after the first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA, Pittsburgh, went on the air).

Both trials were held in fresh and bold times of rapid media dissemination (a landing strip was specially built at Dayton, Tenn. to fly out the news reel footage each day).

All of which brings us to recent times. The O.J. Simpson Trial in 1994 was the first modern judicial circus. It would not have been possible without cheap media, satellite feeds and cable television desperate for content.

Since then, there have been many others, the most recent and obvious being the trial of George Zimmerman.

In times gone by, all else being held constant except for inexpensive and ubiquitous media, the Zimmerman case would have merited no comment.

Yes, Marshall McLuhan was right, “All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” It is as clear in Zimmerman case as in the case of “My blood runs cold, my angel is a centerfold.”

I am not proposing censorship. I am merely pointing out that modern humankind, rather than controlling technology is letting technology control it. No one of stature has come forth to propose a solution. Perhaps that is not even possible.

Yet, we need to find a way to stop the tail from wagging the dog.

Maybe we can find it here.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) about hard-core pornography, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]…but I know it when I see it.”

Modern media has just shown us the judicial equivalent one more time in Florida. Like intimate human relations, perhaps courtroom proceedings are best when kept away from the prying eyes of the camera.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.