It's a Whole New Ballgame

As with so much else, social media has recast trial coverage, and not necessarily for the better.

To begin, I’m not a tabloid news fan, nor am I into celebrity gossip, so the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial caught me by surprise. When it did finally penetrate my consciousness (it was inevitable because at a certain point, it was inescapable), I thought the whole thing distasteful. I come from a lifetime in show business, and I’ve had my fill of public narcissists. I found it hard to root for anyone, and I didn’t give a flip about the outcome. But one thing did catch my eye.

In our new media world, there is much more user-generated content than there is conventional trial coverage, and while even the major mainstream news outlets from CBS to The New York Times gave a lot of time and ink to it, they were playing catchup to the social networks. The online world slobbered over the remains of a marriage gone horrifically bad for weeks and weeks before the trial even began. They were decidedly pro-Johnny and anti-Amber ugly—and I mean not-here-in-a-family-newspaper ugly, not even in the Manson Family newspaper ugly. The mavens—sorry, “influencers”—on social media had already tried and convicted Ms. Heard before the jury was seated and the judge gaveled the trial into session.

There’s a thing called “confirmation bias” that Britannica defines as “the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.” In this instance, that means you can dial up your preferred news slant and never have to be bothered with any other perspective. Also in this instance, once you found the scribes who wrote about the trial from the perspective of the person you favored, that was likely to be all the news you ever got on the subject. If you were Team Johnny, your initial prejudice was reinforced and rewarded with the consistent derision of Team Amber.

Considering the social media obsession, I can’t imagine that it was easy to find jurors without some knowledge of the circumstances.

I guess these are the spoils of the democratization of media. There’s a home for every flavor of predetermined outcome, and the low barrier to entry for the creators—essentially just a phone—has birthed a new cottage industry around the intersection of gossip and legal proceedings. Gatekeepers need not apply. It’s a free-for-all and unless the voices unite, as they did here to the detriment of Team Amber, one voice rarely prevails. In some ways that’s good; it fulfills the original vision of giving everyone a voice. But in our innocence and naiveté, we didn’t realize the range of content we’d get, or how hard it would be to cut through the cacophony.

You’ll get spin. You might even get whiplash. For instance, one of the few Team Amber posters called the outcome (Johnny Depp got $10M and Amber Heard’s counterclaim was awarded $2M) “a split decision.” Foolish conclusions like that are bound to crop up in any relationship that wears blinders like a horse pulling a carriage through Central Park. You’ll hear a lot of, “both sides do it,” and, “Putin’s not that bad.” Low-information, false equivalents are typical.

And there’s a whole separate question of misogyny around the way Ms. Heard was mercilessly denigrated online, and while that’s demonstrably true, it’s not my focus here. I feel badly for anyone who is bullied and trolled online, but for today, I’m focused on the societal ramifications of the whole “choose your news” movement that has us buried deep in our own news silos, never hearing a balanced explanation of all the evidence available. It is to critical thinking what anesthesia is to consciousness.

In this process, we lose an important aspect of objectivity in news reporting. Many of these online bloviators are as narcissistic as Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard. Some remind me of a shopworn phrase about Ted Cruz (R-Cancun). It is said that the most dangerous place in the room is between him and the television cameras. In fairness, that’s true of most Senators and Members of Congress.

A common phrase that you used to hear on the news was that some newsmaker or other was “unavailable for comment.“ That’s all changed, and not necessarily for the better. I’m all for transparency, but in the current age of all-encompassing, all-intrusive, nonstop media, the phrase has been turned on its head, and one might say that the newsmaker (say, Elon Musk, for instance), “is unavoidable for a comment.“

It’s not news that we like and seek out distractions from the challenges of our real lives. Lately, we can use the rest. Nonetheless, comedian Amy Schumer gets the last word here: “I didn’t watch a minute of the trial. Can we talk about gun violence?”

©2022 Jon Sinton