I’ve been wondering for awhile what makes a “trial of the century,” AKA a trial that all of the news media reports on and people follow daily. I know that in some cases with wealthy defendants (like OJ, Martha Stewart, or Lindsay Lohan) the draw is their fame, but what about other cases? Why did the media choose to focus on the Lizzie Borden trial or the Casey Anthony trial? With Anthony, she surely wasn’t the first woman accused of murdering her daughter, or probably even the only case going on at the same time. The same is true with Borden. There are other case out there that have the same qualities, why are these ones the cases the media follows?
Media folk are group oriented. If another outlet is covering something, so will they. There’s a snowball effect. Someone brings up something minimally (which in the OJ case was not so small at all). Another place covers it even more, then the first place ramps it up, etc.
If the initial report doesn’t cause a response by other media, it falls off the map.
Note that the interest of the public has basically nothing to do with this. They get their feedback on what stories to cover from their peers.
In the case of trials, they are like game shows. People like to guess who’s going to win.
Years ago, during the peak of the Lewinsky thing, Peter Jennings started off the ABC Nightly News with a poll that said the overwhelming majority of Americans thought it was a tempest in a teapot and wanted to media to stop covering it. He then spent the next 20 minutes covering it. It didn’t matter what the viewers wanted. The other networks were giving it full coverage so ABC was going to as well.
(We stopped watching national news shortly thereafter. What they covered and what is news are two different things. Like a lot of people, we get our TV news from The Daily Show.)
Usually they have some sort of sensational elements, which can be just about anything.
Consider the real trial of the century – the Hall-Mills case in 1926. The victims were a minister and a member of his church choir, with the bodies found in a known “Lovers Lane” shot in the head and then moved to be placed side by side. You had several potential suspects, and no leads until a witness – called “the Pig Lady” – came forward. She was dying of cancer as the trial begun, brought into the courtroom and giving her testimony on a hospital bed. The accused were from a very wealthy New Jersey family. One of the accused was an in-law of Hall’s wife, and had the reputation of being very simple minded. The trial created more ink than any trial up to this time, and set the standard for "trials of the century.’
So you had sex, murder, a potential conspiracy, vivid personalities, wealth, and the type of crime scene that you usually see on CSI. That set the template for the trials to follow.
Nancy Grace.
StG
The trials of both Leopold and Loeb and the murder of Stanford White both predate the Hall-Mills case and I think are much more famous. I’d never even heard of the Hall-Mills case before.