The trial of former President Donald J. Trump has all the elements of a made-for-TV thriller: sex, politics and possible consequences for the future of the republic.
One problem: there is no television.
Cameras and audio recording devices have been banned from the Lower Manhattan courtroom hosting the first criminal trial against a former president, creating something of a headache for cable news anchors and producers assigned to cover an event. monumental in American life through a decidedly visual and auditory medium.
Monday’s testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer-turned-prosecution witness, was the kind of highly anticipated, high-drama moment that would make for riveting television if it could be seen live. Instead, anyone watching television saw a continuous graph of text-based updates (essentially an on-air blog, with real-time updates sent by a reporter sitting in the courtroom) as anchors and legal experts pontificated. in proceedings they could neither see nor hear.
Sketches, photographs and images of Trump entering and leaving the courthouse now regularly fill the screens of major cable news channels, as their on-air staff chronicles the day’s events. The coverage has the feel of a live baseball radio broadcast, with commentators creating word pictures for their audience.
“We’re told that Donald Trump, as is his custom, is looking forward in his seat, not to the right, where Michael Cohen is the witness,” host Jake Tapper told CNN viewers Monday morning after that Cohen took the stand. “Cohen leans to the right, then stands and identifies Trump in court.” He later added that Trump’s “eyes seemed closed, just as Cohen is identifying him.”
Last week, Tapper, who has been among the main faces of CNN’s trial coverage, decided that if he couldn’t share live footage from the courtroom with his viewers, he would look for the next best option.
Tapper, a semi-professional cartoonist who once wrote a comic strip for Washington’s Roll Call newspaper, opened a drawing app on his iPad and drew his own sketches in the courtroom. “Art is interpretive, obviously,” he told viewers, before introducing his images of Trump, Stormy Daniels, Judge Juan M. Merchan and other key figures. (Mr. Tapper also highlighted the talents of the regular courtroom artists covering the trial, including Jane Rosenberg and Christine Cornell.)
“We must take advantage of every opportunity to bring this story to life, bringing viewers and listeners into this closed courtroom with the resources at our disposal,” Tapper wrote in an email Monday. “Anything we can do to bring this to life for audiences will make a difference in how they understand the story that unfolds.”
Television journalists have some useful tools at their disposal.
Judge Merchan agreed that journalists occupying seats inside the courtroom could stream updates from their laptops, allowing for instant updates. (In the courtroom, the sound of fingers tapping on keyboards tends to increase during important moments of testimony.)
In some previous high-profile trials without cameras, such as the Martha Stewart case in 2004, journalists resorted to other methods, such as rushing out of the courtroom to make phone calls and relay details to editors and producers.
Transcripts from Trump’s trial are also being released relatively quickly, shortly after the end of the day’s proceedings, allowing legal experts to review the testimony in its entirety before his appearances on prime-time cable shows.
One such expert is Jeffrey Toobin, the veteran legal journalist who helped pioneer television court reporting during the 1995 OJ Simpson murder trial, a fully televised spectacle that gripped the nation for weeks. In an interview, Toobin, who is analyzing the Trump trial for CNN, said the lack of cameras had clearly changed the way this trial had been perceived and absorbed into the culture.
“If there were cameras in the courtroom, they would be at the DO level,” Toobin said. “The confrontations between Cohen and Trump, and Stormy and Trump, would have been the defining television images of the year, if not the decade. Those images simply do not exist.”
Trump’s trial has still attracted a lot of attention, Toobin said, acknowledging that “there is more at stake for the future of the republic here than with OJ.” But he said he didn’t expect relatively dark numbers. In this case Trump, as the judge and the lead lawyers, reach the same level of fame as his counterparts in the Simpson trial, such as Lance Ito and Johnnie Cochran.
“Lawyers get a lot less famous this way,” Toobin joked.