Opinion: It’s ludicrous that Americans can’t watch the Trump trial for ourselves

Editor’s Note: David Zurawik is a professor of practice in media studies at Goucher College. For three decades, he was a media critic at the Baltimore Sun. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

I cannot remember a single thing said by the multitude of news anchors and talking heads who took to the airwaves during the barrage of reporting that followed the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. But I have a gallery of mental images — seared into my brain and into our nation’s collective consciousness — from days and days of news coverage that followed that tragic event.

Those visuals became synonymous with the truth of that awful time for me — and I dare say for millions of other Americans. They say in TV news that, “If it’s not on film, it didn’t happen.” I suppose the inverse is also true: If you witness it with your own eyes, the magnitude and the impact of the event become even greater.

It’s for that reason that the more television coverage I watch of the first criminal trial of an American president, the more incensed I become about not being able to see the historic event for myself.

It’s nothing short of scandalous that television, which played such a huge role in making us a predominantly visual culture during the second half of the 20th century, cannot now show us what could be one of the most important political moments of the 21st.

Trump is being tried on charges of falsifying business records to hide hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 presidential vote — a seismic trial that could impact the outcome of this year’s White House election.

The most powerful moments in our lives demand the images that accompany the events. I want to have the knowledge of my own eyes during this trial in an election year that may decide the fate of our country — possibly the world. But a hopelessly out of date New York state law that aimed, when it was put into place early in the last century, to maintain courtroom decorum, is keeping cameras away from the proceedings.

Hence the cartoon-like courtroom sketches — some pretty good, and some less so — that are the closest most of us will come to seeing how the witnesses, the attorneys and the judge appeared during the trial.

Sketches of the proceedings are quaint, even charming. But I want to see for myself if Trump — who has been known to lambaste his 2024 opponent, President Joe Biden, as “Sleepy Joe” — was really falling asleep or merely meditating with a drooping head during the trial. I also want to “know” with my own eyes whether he was visibly agitated enough during Daniels’ testimony to be “cursing audibly,” as the judge later said in a warning to Trump.

I’ve found it informative and instructive to read accounts about the trial in the newspaper and watch the analysts discuss it on TV. But as diligent as the correspondents and commentators have been in relating back to us what they saw in that courtroom, it is not the same as judging for ourselves —  especially when there is considerable disagreement  among them as to what they saw and what it meant.

A decade from now, will anyone remember what’s been written or said about Daniels’ putdowns of Trump, or how (according to some commentators) believable Michael Cohen came across during direct testimony? Will they remember how he might have torpedoed the prosecution’s case with flubbed testimony late in the trial? I wonder how different our own assessment of what did or didn’t take place in the courtroom would be if we had been able to see the witnesses testify for ourselves.

Think, too, about how much larger the audience would have been if Americans had been watching this live, real-time drama filled with these tabloid characters, instead of seeing reporters or anchors reading from transcripts of what happened earlier in the courtroom?

The men and women who form the panel listening to the testimony in court will determine whether the president is found guilty of the crimes he’s been charged with in this “hush money” case. But members of the American public are part of a bigger jury, one that will decide who will be president after our votes are counted in 2024.

I think we deserve a hard, sustained look at Candidate Trump under pressure on a stage that he did not choose, not one staged to make him look more presidential. We especially deserve to hear how he appears on the witness stand in the unlikely event that he decides to testify. We know how easy it would be to televise Trump’s trial and other court proceedings: the vast majority of states already allow cameras in the courtroom.

Of course, TV is far from perfect. Like any other medium, it can distort reality and can be manipulated. That’s one argument used for keeping cameras out of the courtroom. And yes, it’s true that images are filtered and framed: We only see what the cameras — and producers who direct the filming — allow us to see on our television screens.

But there are many times when cameras convey the essence of a person or a situation in a way that words simply cannot.

Television cameras captured, for instance, the twisted essence of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. In a TV flash, millions of viewers understood the mean and debased core of McCarthy when he was asked by the Army’s attorney, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, was not in Trump’s league in terms of power, but he was very much the same kind of dangerous, dark and deeply divisive force in American life as the former president.

Another argument sometimes heard for banning cameras from the courtroom is that they will turn trials into spectacles or, at least, entertainment events rather than serious legal proceedings. The O.J. Simpson trial in 1995 is sometimes cited as an example of that. And that trial was entertaining, no denying that.

But that murder trial also taught millions of viewers important truths about race and culture — mainly that all of us see people and events through the lens of our personal histories of social class, family, race, ethnicity, religion and education. It taught us that there is no one, true America — there are lots of Americas and we need to understand and respect that if we are going to function as a more perfect union.

In the wake of the acquittal, mainstream media was  flooded with reports and analyses about the “Black, White Divide,” as if it was something new. It wasn’t new — just newly exposed to millions of viewers, including editors and network producers, by the TV trial.

That was a good thing: Televised coverage of the Simpson trial made the nation smarter about culture, justice and race. Because we got to see it for ourselves, we have the images of Simpson, attorney Johnnie Cochran and others to help us remember what we learned in front of the screen.

And what about the historical record of this momentous trial? Not only are we, the potential voters in the 2024 presidential election, being cheated by not being able to watch the Trump trial on TV in real time, but future generations will also be robbed by not being able to replay images from an independent video record of the trial and learn the lessons it has to teach us.

Since a live feed of the hush money trial is being shown in an overflow room at the courthouse, there just might be a video record that someone will be able to access. I’d love to see it someday, if that’s ever an option. But it would likely be controlled by the court. And I do not want any court controlling the historical record of an event as important as this.

From the Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon, to the Supreme Court itself, the behind-closed-doors deliberations that govern cases involving Trump actually contribute to a more divided nation by denying Americans the chance to see what the rule of law looks like when applied to someone who once held the highest office in the land.

It also denies them the chance to see the kinds of preferential treatment he may be getting in some courtrooms — in other words, how and when our system fails to provide impartial justice. We could — and should — be able to see all of this. It’s a huge societal failure that we cannot.

Since the middle of the last century, we have had the technology to let all Americans bear witness to how effective the rule of law is when put to the test, as it is now with a former president who at times has appeared indifferent to, or even scornful of it. It’s long past time for us to use that technology in the interest of shoring up our democracy.