Court TV Puts The Spotlight On The American Justice System
It’s pretty amazing. Five years ago, TV coverage of trials consisted of reporters’ summaries and pastel chalk illustrations. And we were content with that. Court TV, which marked its fifth anniversary early this month, changed everything.
We now expect TV to supply us with the actual sounds and pictures of events taking place inside courtrooms, and anything less seems substandard. No offense to all the artists who worked all those years under difficult conditions and against atrocious deadlines to capture and convey a sense of courtroom realities, but renderings on sketch pads simply won’t cut it anymore.
The difference is Court TV. Whether filling its own cable channel with legal proceedings and related material 24 hours a day, supplying a pool feed for other media outlets (as it did for the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, to name just one prominent example) or providing trial clips for local and national newscasts - this operation has transformed the essential nature of the beast.
At the same time, the Court TV name, as perfect a channel label as has ever been coined, has entered the basic American vocabulary. Say “Court TV,” and everybody seems to know what you’re talking about - even if they don’t subscribe to cable, or have access to it but have never watched.
That’s brand recognition that most products only dream of achieving, and Court TV’s corporate parents (Time Warner owns a third, TCI Cable owns a third and Cablevision and NBC split the last third) have made the most of it. The channel says it recently began turning a profit - sooner than originally projected.
It’s worth pointing out that Court TV has done all this despite stunningly low viewership that rises and falls in direct proportion to the public interest in a given trial.
According to A.C. Nielsen estimates for the second quarter of this year, for example, the channel was on in an average of just 15,000 homes at any given moment during a week. For last year’s second quarter, which included part of the Simpson trial, the comparable figure was 136,000 homes.
For the record, Court TV currently is available in 26 million homes, compared to, say, CNN’s 68.5 million.
More importantly, Court TV’s programing delivers something uniquely valuable to the American public. What Court TV really does is pull back the curtain on the justice system. Sometimes, what we find behind it are prosecutors and defense lawyers pulling stunts and working the angles. Sometimes, it’s inept judges. Sometimes, the system looks like it’s making sausage instead of dispensing justice, and it’s not pretty.
The point, though, is that all this activity - whether it’s exciting, routine, inspiring or disgusting - is supposed to be out in the open where we can see it, judge it, debate it, praise it or denounce it.
Court TV puts it there.