Media Blackouts, Pesky Reporters and ‘Sleepy Don’

April 28, 2024 Michael Olesker

We return to a New York City courtroom this week where the firsthand sight of history being made in all its Technicolor glory will continue to be blacked out.

Tough luck, America.

Donald Trump finally has to face up to criminal court proceedings. But we’ll have to take other people’s summaries and interpretations for whatever’s happening to the former president of the United States.

That is, except for whenever Trump gives us his own twisted version of events. He manages to mouth off whenever the mood strikes him, on the way into court each morning or coming back out each afternoon. Or sometimes in messages he sends out in the middle of his sleepless nights.

For all of his followers who suspect government — the “Deep State,” there’s a phrase that will live in infamy — of dark motives, this will feed right into their paranoia.

Yeah, who’d want to stick a few cameras into that courtroom? Then you’d run the risk of all those Trump True Believers getting a closeup, real-time, irrefutable look as the sleazy story is told.

We have cameras today that can track spaceships into the darkness of the heavens themselves, but we can’t set them up for public viewing in that courtroom in downtown New York City, which likes to think of itself as the media capital of the world.

In the two-and-a-half-century history of the United States of America, we’ve never had a president facing criminal charges of any kind, much less those of the sleaziest manner.

But we’ll have to take reporters’ words for whatever’s going on. This is no knock on them. These reporters are professionals, they’re responsible, they’re doing their best. They’re not all like those liars from The Enquirer who cheated and covered up and made up phony stories to help Trump bamboozle the whole country.

The notion of cameras in courtrooms is a battle that precedes Trump’s case by decades. Federal laws, state laws — they were put in place in the belief that courtrooms demand a kind of isolation from the outside world, that the proceedings are too important to allow any distractions.

We’ve already got lawyers who love the sheer theatricality of the job. You put cameras into courts, goes the thinking, and you run the risk of Shakespearean theater breaking out.

Some of this pre-dates TV itself. Go back to the 1930s and the Lindbergh baby kidnaping case. Still cameras were allowed into the courtroom, and some of them were placed right on witness tables. Flashbulbs were going off. All of this distracted from the needed decorum of the moment.

But we don’t have to go back to Lindbergh. The recent death of O.J. Simpson is a reminder of the star system theatricality produced by TV cameras at Simpson’s murder trial, starting with the judge himself.

So where does that leave us now?

It leaves us with reports of Trump falling asleep in court almost every day. This man calls President Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe,” and yet he’s the guy dozing off as the sleaziest charges are leveled against him.

Or do you believe it’s just those pesky reporters making up stories about Trump unable to stay awake? Folks, cameras in the courtroom would help us make up our minds.

And what about the money? It’s not just that Trump was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy silence from a couple of professional ladies (while his wife, Melania, was home with their newborn son).

It’s that he paid the money so that voters, already in a state of revulsion over the so-called “Access Hollywood” tapes, wouldn’t find out about the other sexual trysts. He was trying to fix an election. He was trying to rig history itself.

And we can’t even see Trump’s expression as these charges are finally thrown in his face.

So now we go back to that New York courtroom and other courtrooms as well. Reporters will be there. They’ll do their analyses and their interpretations for us.

But wouldn’t it be better if we could do our own?

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University Press).