Media Feeding Frenzy Subsists on Morsels

By James Rainey

Feb. 5, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

SANTA MARIA, Calif. — The international media beamed the news from this modest city around the globe, and it amounted to this: Michael Jackson wore a white suit. Then he wore a black suit. He appeared serious. And so did many Santa Barbara County residents, determined to stay off a jury that may take five months to decide whether the pop star is guilty of molesting a teenage boy.

With 500 journalists and two dozen satellite trucks laying siege to the Royce R. Lewellen Justice Center earlier this week, some wondered: What happens when real news breaks out?

They will have to wait a while longer to find out, because court officials announced Friday that jury selection would be delayed several days. The reason is that the sister of Jackson’s lead attorney is gravely ill.

Some 250 prospective jurors are still to report to the courthouse Monday for administrative processing. However, their questioning in open court by attorneys on both sides will not start until at least Thursday.

On Monday, Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville will hear a request by the media for access to questionnaires that were filled out last week by the prospective jurors.

Neither Jackson nor defense attorney Thomas Mesereau will be in court for that hearing.

Journalists assigned to the trial seem alternately energized, appalled and amused by the spectacle they are helping to create. They might be alarmed, but many have come to accept their fate, trapped inside the celebrity infotainment machine.

It’s a place where Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera declares Jackson the victim of an “avalanche of injustice” and promises to shave his mustache if the pop singer is convicted. It’s where Court TV’s Nancy Grace furrows her brow and waves her small fist to show how she would respond if a grown man tried to get in bed with her nephew. It’s where Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth, in a radio interview, describes how the defendant’s sense of right and wrong might be skewed by a case of “situational narcissism.”

The television headliners pace the narrow, fenced press pit in front of the courthouse along with hundreds of reporters from mainstream newspapers and television stations. If the lines between information and advocacy had already become indistinct, this trial should make them fuzzier still.

Witness the arrival in Santa Maria of justicesystem.net. Former Jackson defense attorney Mark Geragos owns a principal interest in the video-streaming website, which has deployed three Jackson boosters to file dispatches from the trial.

Many establishment journalists get queasy being thrown in with such alternative media. But none of them are going away anytime soon. All seem to agree, more or less, with the assessment of Nick Papps of News Limited, Australia’s 10-million-reader newspaper chain.

“Michael Jackson is the biggest fall from grace we have had in the popular culture in some time,” Papps said as he waited for a press credential. “This is as big as it gets.”

Though the main invasion force stormed Santa Maria only last week, the first media wave hit the beach more than a year ago for Jackson’s arraignment.

New England Satellite Systems had already taken over a three-unit apartment building across from the single-story court by then and begun transforming it into a production facility with studios, 17 video-editing stations and enough hardware to transmit a dozen television signals simultaneously worldwide. ABC demonstrated its long-term commitment in recent days when it installed a new sidewalk over the cable it laid to its courthouse-adjacent offices.

Court TV’s Diane Dimond made her name when she broke the news 12 years ago of earlier molestation allegations against Jackson. Back for the long haul this time, Dimond dragged so many clothes west from New York that, as she quipped to USA Today, it “looked like Imelda Marcos going through the airport.”

Santa Marians are determined not to let their moment in the spotlight go unexploited.

Lawyer Michael Clayton leased his office rooftop for $2,500 a day to “Entertainment Tonight” and other broadcasters. Someone hacked the tops off the cherry trees across the street in the dead of night, ensuring an unobstructed camera shot of the spot where Jackson’s black SUV arrives each day.

Behind the courthouse, the women who own the Bistro Coffee Diem installed wireless Internet service. That helped quadruple business and make their tiny cafe a favorite, the news set lolling under umbrellas and poring over laptops .

It all began Sunday, with reporters waiting as long as 4 1/2 hours to get a press credential. That gave them access only to the narrow media pen in the courthouse parking lot.

The journalists remained mostly frisky and collegial in the long line, though some grumbled when Marcia Clark, the former O.J. Simpson prosecutor and current “Entertainment Tonight” commentator, cut to a spot her colleagues had saved her near the front of the line.

There were quiet cracks about Clark’s newly blond hair, about the convenient reversal of her onetime disdain for the media, even about her tactics in the mother of all celebrity trials 10 years ago. “Why’d you let him try on the glove?” one reporter called after the former deputy district attorney.

Even without Clark’s presence, comparisons to Simpson’s murder trial were ubiquitous.

“This is going to be easier than O.J. for us,” said Luca Celada, a correspondent for the Italian national television network, RAI. “That was so big, we had to cover it. But we always had to explain who O.J. Simpson was.

“This is Michael Jackson. It’s celebrity, it’s prurient and it’s easy to tell. It works for us.”

News organizations came up with a variety of ways to play the story.

The New York Times buried its opening-day story on Page 12, while the Washington Post put it on the front of its features section. The Los Angeles Times, in contrast, ran Jackson’s photograph and a story on Page 1 of its front section.

A CNN producer, finishing Day One of the trial with a cold drink in the darkened Tap Room of the Santa Maria Inn, expressed misgivings privately about her network’s fixation on the story.

“It’s a monumental day with the voting in Iraq. And we lead with the Jackson story? This is the new reality.... But it’s a water-cooler story. Everyone will talk about it. What can you do?”

Geragos’ news partner and the reporters for his website expressed no such ambivalence. They want to cover the story big.

Every weekday at 11 a.m. the partner, Carol Angela Davis, posts a five-minute video report on the website. She offers sympathetic views on the legal travails of celebrities such as Robert Blake and Courtney Love (“Go Courtney!”).

But lately, justicesystem.net has focused on Jackson. Davis chided Santa Barbara County Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon when a sealed grand jury transcript was leaked to the media. Melville took a hit for giving seven courtroom seats to the media but none to Jackson’s parents.

“This lends further and further credence to the fact that in America now, more and more people are being tried by the media and not by the justice system,” Davis said in one report.

The Jackson boosters who received credentials to cover the trial for the website are Sharon Sidney, a baby-faced security guard from Santa Maria; Gail Felix, a former drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselor from Tracy, Calif.; and Angel Howansky, spokeswoman for Jackson’s parents.

Conceding that they are not trained journalists, they argue that they will be fairer than some, including Court TV’s Dimond, who they say are shills for the prosecution. “Somebody needs to make sure the other side is mentioned,” said Davis, a former Chicago television journalist and law school graduate. “That is just being fair.”

Davis anchors the web reports from her office at Geragos & Geragos in downtown Los Angeles. But she and Geragos insist that the celebrity lawyer has nothing to do with the trial coverage. (Geragos dropped from Jackson’s defense last April when he was immersed in Scott Peterson’s murder defense.)

“I don’t know anything about it. I’m an investor; that’s all I am,” Geragos said in an interview. “I have purposefully distanced myself from this case.”

Justicesystem.net has not been allocated any of the 47 courtroom seats set aside for the media when testimony begins later this month. A committee of journalists, divvying up the spots, concluded that the website could not demonstrate an audience as big as other news outlets.

But Jackson fans have not rolled over. Late last week, a UCLA student called court officials to say she would be serving as a reporter intern for

justice system.net and needed a special spot because she was disabled.

Darrel Parker, administrator of the Santa Maria court complex, guesses what might be coming next. “I think,” Parker said, “they are going to try to make this an ADA issue.”

The Americans With Disabilities Act requires the disabled to have access to public facilities.

But Davis and Geragos had nothing more to say.

The celebrity lawyer said he could not answer questions, even in his role as news executive, because of a gag order in the case.

“I don’t want to do anything to skirt the gag order,” Geragos said. “I don’t want to even appear to skirt it, either in its letter or its spirit.”