ne does not have to listen too carefully to surmise where Geraldo Rivera, the Fox News Channel correspondent and anchor, stands on Scott Peterson's alleged role in the killing of his wife, Laci. Posted on 04/26/2003 6:59:04 AM PDT by Dog Gone
ne does not have to listen too carefully to surmise where Geraldo Rivera, the Fox News Channel correspondent and anchor, stands on Scott Peterson's alleged role in the killing of his wife, Laci.
"Fertilizer salesman Scott Peterson's alibi stunk as badly as the stuff he sells," Mr. Rivera told his viewers one recent night, also referring to Mr. Peterson as "the rat now caught in the trap."
Nancy Grace, a Court TV anchor and a regular guest on CNN, does not seem to have much doubt about Mr. Peterson's culpability, either. Asked on "Larry King Live" this week whether Mr. Peterson could have accidentally killed his wife during an argument, Ms. Grace asked, "Why would you attach her feet to a concrete block and throw her into the bay?" There is no proof, Mr. King had to point out, that Mr. Peterson did any such thing.
As the war in Iraq comes to an end, the Laci Peterson case has grabbed much of the news media spotlight. And some critics say elements of the news media, particularly some commentators and anchors on the cable news networks, are reprising the worst journalistic habits exhibited during the coverage of the disappearance of Chandra A. Levy: all but convicting Mr. Peterson while repeated damning rumors.
"Is it a story? Yes," said Jim Murphy, the "CBS Evening News" producer who made public his distaste for the cable coverage of the Levy case. "Are they making too much of it? Yes. But it's sort of what it's become on cable."
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said: "There's a profound journalistic question at play here. Is any speculation or assertion fair game? Or do we have a responsibility to weigh the rights of the accused along with the rights of fair trial?"
Television news executives said the case had become prominent because it has so many gripping elements: a pregnant victim and her cheating husband as a prime suspect. And they said speculation on the case had come from informed legal experts and had been balanced by defense lawyers' arguing the other side and by anchors who tried to weed fact from supposition.
The facts of the case do not appear favorable to Mr. Peterson. Ms. Peterson, eight months pregnant, disappeared on the afternoon of Dec. 24, when Mr. Peterson said he was out fishing about 90 miles their Modesto, Calif., home. Ms. Peterson's body, and that of her unborn child, appeared near where Mr. Peterson said he had been fishing. The police seeking his arrest found him in San Diego County — where his parents live — 30 miles from the Mexican border with bleached hair and, the police said, $10,000 in cash. The California attorney general, Bill Lockyer, called the case against Mr. Peterson a "slam dunk."
Supposition of guilt has not been confined to television news. On the day after Mr. Peterson's arraignment, The New York Post's front page showed a photograph of Mr. Peterson in shackles with the headline "Monster in Chains."
But critics have taken special issue with TV news, picking up their complaints last heard during the coverage in 2001 about the disappearance of Ms. Levy. Gary A. Condit, then a congressman representing Modesto, who was linked romantically with Ms. Levy, complained that he was convicted in the court of public opinion without formal charges, and some news executives agreed.
Dan Abrams, the legal correspondent and anchor for MSNBC, said such criticism was unfair. Mr. Condit and Mr. Peterson, he said, made their stories bigger by acting suspiciously.
"The problem with both Gary Condit and Scott Peterson is that they refused to answer certain pertinent questions," Mr. Abrams said.
He acknowledged that "it happens in cable that you get people who throw out something they read, a report in a tabloid, and state it as a fact." But Mr. Abrams said it was his job "to say, Wait a second, we don't know that to be true." And, he said, accusations are mitigated by guests who support the defendants.
But in this case the traditional television defenders have not picked up Mr. Peterson's side with any great passion.
"I'm usually the guy who's on here arguing vociferously for the fact that we shouldn't rush to judgment," Mark Geragos, a defense lawyer, said last week on Fox News. But, he said, "There's a lot of guys sitting in state prison on a lot less evidence."
Ms. Grace, a former prosecutor, said she believed that speculation about murder suspects was a time-honored American tradition.
"Before the advent of television," said said, "when people were not huddled around the TV, they were huddled around the dinner table, the bar, you name it, talking about the murder case at the courthouse."
Kirk McAllister, Mr. Peterson's lawyer until his arraignment, said the coverage "obviously prejudices" the case.
Regardless of what the coverage says about journalism, Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said he believed Mr. Peterson would be able to get a fair trial.
"Jurors aren't going to be basing their decisions on what Geraldo said," Mr. Chemerinsky said. "If they did, O. J. Simpson would have been found guilty."
Uh, hello? The requirement of a presumption of innocence applies only to the people actually involved in the legal system, such as the jurors. Everyone else still gets to speak their mind and formulate opinions.
Sheesh. How far gone are we when we're prepared to invent a moral imperative that people not express opinions about the events of the day?
Me too......
Do you suppose that they had it decided before they came in? Nah....they had to have based their decision on the evidence....[/sarcasm]
No. The worry, by network news producers, is that more people will continue to turn to cable.
As Chemerinsky said, if cable networks had been able to influence jury pools, OJ Simpson would be busting rocks.
According to them, word is Scott actually sealed his wife in a barrel that he had access too...(fertilizer?)...and didn't figure the ...um...decomposition & resulting gases...would pop open the barrel.
I know this sounds farfetched, but I heard this last nigh.
And Chris Matthews didn't laugh at her either....
Even if that were the case, and I think sinkspur's made a good observation that it's not, the potential risk of polluting the jury pool is still better than the actual remedy of gagging the media and the people, since that's about the only way you'll get people to stop - by forcing them to shut up.
Worth a repeat but it is not just in relation to Clinton and his many transgressions, it is a typical liberal whine when caught red handed in anything.
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