A Case Of The Giggles

Courtrooms in the USA must be a pretty dull places, cause when there was some witty banter between a witness and the prosecutor in the Jackson trail it made front page news.

Journalists, of course, could not lead with that headline. Not even they could lead with "Jacko witness gets laugh", even though I'm sure it crossed the editor's mind at least once. No, they chop and changed it into a few pages worth of dribble about what these smirk's of mirth had to say about the justice system in the USA.

I can solve there conundrum for them. What does it say about the court system in the United States? NOTHING. A judge had a laugh, it is not the next step in evolution of man.

But these headlines do raise a few interesting insights into the profession of journalism in the States.

I'm a great fan of finding a new angle to a story, but there is also a point where this gets to be less of an angle and more of an attempt to fill pages without having to put your foot, out of the newsroom. What is more convenient then taken a blown out of proportion case and just tagging any old thing at the end of it. You get home early and the hubby and wife are not mad at you. Isn't it all in a days work?

Does any of us think that a headline about the giggles would have made a frontpage if it happened in another child abuse court case? HELL NO. It become a headline cause in some way it could be linked to a celebrity, even if it was just in some pointless, trivial way.

Roy Peter Clark, of the Poynter Institute for Media Sudies, in his comments to the Baltimore Sun said it best: "Journalists have a responsibility to make the important interesting rather than to just continually try to make us believe the interesting is important."