The Hindu : International : Celebrity trials to dominate U.S. small screens

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Sunday, Jul 04, 2004

International

International

Celebrity trials to dominate U.S. small screens

By Richard Luscombe

MIAMI, JULY 3. Famous faces will fill America's television screens this summer. But though it's a presidential election year, it won't be the U.S. President, George W. Bush, and his Democratic rival, John Kerry, who dominate the airtime.

As a wave of celebrity criminal cases hit the courtrooms, politics is ready to cede the schedules to the indiscretions of pop singers, sports stars, actors and TV cooks. There might be a war somewhere in the Middle East, but it's the ratings battle going on closer to home that the networks are looking forward to.

"They're drooling," said Professor Robert Thompson, director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television at New York's Syracuse University. "The cable stations in particular can't wait for all this stuff."

The biggest of all will be Michael Jackson's child molestation trial, due to begin on 13 September. Before then, viewers can pick from any number of stars. Kobe Bryant, basketball's biggest draw, will stand trial for rape; domestic diva Martha Stewart will be sentenced for an insider-trading scandal this month; on 9 September, actor Robert Blake is due in court, accused of murdering his wife.

Already under way is the trial of Scott Peterson, accused of the killing of his pregnant wife Laci.

Still to be set is a date for record producer Phil Spector to face a jury over the murder of an actress.

Broadcast networks CBS, ABC and NBC, and leading cable news channels CNN, Fox and MSNBC, have allocated millions of dollars and fleets of TV lorries to cover the hearings.

Andrew Tyndall, a New York researcher who monitors the nightly news bulletins by the broadcast networks, has recorded major disparities.

Last March, in the week Kerry clinched the presidential nomination, the story got two-and-a-half times less coverage than the Stewart trial.

Her conviction got almost 10 per cent of airtime. None of this comes as a surprise to some in the industry, who lament that obsession with celebrity appears to be increasingly driving the news agenda and displacing stories with greater significance, such as the Iraq war and the congressional hearings into the 11 September attacks.

"The only thing stopping celebrity trials from taking over everything is that the networks become so guilt-ridden they force themselves to do some other stories," said Tom Rosensteil, head of the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism. —

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