A Trying Time For the Media At Jackson Trial

Police ticket a line of TV satellite trucks last week outside the Marian Medical Center in Santa Maria, where Michael Jackson was recovering from the flu. (Michael A. Mariant -- AP)

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- Of course Michael Jackson's trial on child-molestation charges will be a media circus. You can tell that just by looking at the satellite TV trucks lined up cheek-by-jowl and the spider's web of cable strung by the electronic media around the Lewellen Justice Center, the site of Jackson's trial, in this modest town on California's central coast.

But in the annals of lurid, media-fueled trials, M.J.'s probably won't rank with O.J.'s. It may even turn out to be something less than Scott Peterson's. Unless Jackson intends to moonwalk on the roof of an SUV each day, the restrictions placed on news organizations by Judge Rodney S. Melville seem likely to suppress the media fireworks -- and the public's interest along with them. There's simply going to be a shortage of compelling pictures here, and TV can't survive long without that.

What's more, as the Jackson trial resumed yesterday after a week-long delay, the nature of the case -- allegations by a then-13-year-old boy that Jackson served him alcohol and sexually abused him -- is already making TV producers nervous about what they'll permit their correspondents to say about the proceeding.

At 46, Jackson is by far the most famous person in America, and perhaps the world, who has ever been put on trial on a felony charge (in his case, 10 of them). Though he's past his prime, Jackson's international fame, born of millions in album sales and years of pervasive weirdness, surpasses the renown of every accused miscreant in the past 10 years. That ever-expanding list includes O.J. Simpson, Peterson, record producer Phil Spector, Winona Ryder, Martha Stewart, Robert Blake, comedian Paula Poundstone, Kobe Bryant and Jayson Williams.

As such, the media caravan kicked up a considerable dust cloud as it thundered into Santa Maria. All the American news networks are here, as are major broadcasters from Europe, Asia and Australia. Almost a thousand media passes have been issued by Santa Barbara County superior court (the vast majority, it appears, went to technicians and production people, not correspondents).

The media have only seven reserved seats in the courtroom -- reporters rotate in and out on a set schedule -- so news people by the dozens sit all day on metal folding chairs in a large, wood-paneled trailer near the courtroom. They watch a closed-circuit feed of the trial on a single 36-inch RCA TV set.

Camera positions in front of the courthouse, where Jackson alights from his motorcade each day, are at such a premium that court officials have marked off three-foot-wide parcels on the parking lot, assigning each news crew to its own mini-pad. "Entertainment Tonight" somehow snagged two slots, one-upping "Access Hollywood."

The big boys have gone even further. CNN has built a camera platform next to the Salvation Army soup kitchen across the street from the courthouse. NBC has erected a multistory structure, dubbed "Peacock Tower," on an adjacent ball field. Fox, CBS and Court TV are building another tower of babble nearby. Surveying the setup the other day, Raul Marin, a freelance cameraman who has shot several celebrity trials, observed, "It looks like we're covering the Rose Parade."

In a sense, they are. The daily arrival shot of Jackson's motorcade is vital because it may be the only glimpse of Jackson the TV cameras will get (a pool camera may show him walking through the building's metal detector as well). Unlike O.J. trial judge Lance Ito, Melville has banned cameras from his courtroom. Melville is so camera-shy that he declined to pose for generic (so-called "B-roll") footage of himself walking into the courtroom until media reps petitioned him.

The absence of courtroom cameras means that Jackson's trial won't unfold to viewers like the daily dramatic series that was Simpson's criminal murder case. With no TV, there will be fewer "characters" and personalities around which to build interest. O.J. had a steady stream of them -- Ito, prosecutor Marcia Clark, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, friend-of-the-defendant Kato Kaelin, rogue cop Mark Fuhrman, etc. Though Jackson's defense said last week that it might call such celebrities as Elizabeth Taylor and Stevie Wonder to the witness stand, the regular players -- his lawyers, the investigators and prosecutors and certainly Jackson's accuser -- aren't likely to become well known to the public.