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There are trials that grab public attention – and then there is the unprecedented trial of former U.S. President Donald Trump that begins in a New York City courtroom next week. That trial promises to be the focus of massive news coverage across the globe.
How should we cover such an over-covered event? That was the question the politics team grappled with over the last month. How can we provide information that the public doesn’t know already?
We settled on four stories. First was a story by political scientist and legal scholar Paul Collins, from UMass Amherst, who wrote about Trump’s attacks on the trial judge and his daughter from the perspective of how they affected democracy. The attacks, Collins wrote, are the latest in Trump’s “long effort to undermine the rule of law. The attacks demonstrate his efforts to appear to play by the rules, but in reality to violate the norm of respect for the judiciary that previous presidents have followed, even when they disagreed with court decisions.”
Next, Harvard criminal law expert Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. asked, and answered, the question, “Given all the news coverage of Trump’s legal woes and antics, just how does the court select a fair and impartial jury?” Sullivan digs into what he calls a “popular misconception,” that an impartial juror doesn’t know anything about the case. “That is inaccurate,” writes Sullivan.
Tomorrow, we have an interview with two scholars, Tim Bakken, a former prosecutor and now a scholar of law at West Point, and Karrin Vasby Anderson, an expert on political communication at Colorado State. Usually, when I do an interview, I ask a lot of questions. In this case, the conversation between the two about the charges against Trump and his authoritarian rhetoric about being a political victim was so good I just got out of the way and let them talk.
And on Monday morning, just before the trial begins, you’ll be able to read University of Texas journalism scholar Mary Angela Bock’s look at what will be happening behind the scenes as journalists and photographers gather. “Photojournalists will likely work from cordoned-off pens in the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, and if their scrums are anything like the others I’ve studied over time, they’ll gather very early, stake claim to key spots and spend far more time waiting than recording video,” she writes.
Also in this week’s politics news:
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