Restraint is essential in covering assaults
The life of the law, as Justice Holmes once said, is experience.
So, too, the life of the media.
And just as there is a well-known legal maxim that hard cases make bad law, there ought to be a journalistic admonition that intensely covered criminal cases involving celebrities spawn dubious recommendations and conclusions by the ream.
That's exactly what's occurring in the free-for-all surrounding Lakers star Kobe Bryant and the young woman who has accused him of sexually assaulting her at a Colorado resort. A variety of commentators now are arguing that it is unfair to subject Bryant to the usual pre-trial pillory while his accuser remains unnamed. Others, more thoughtful, contend that the media's practice of maintaining the anonymity of even alleged victims of sexual assault actually reinforces the penumbra of shame traditionally cast by this crime; simply treating rape as if it were any other crime in which the names of the accuser and the accused are routinely reported would lift the burden from victims' shoulders.
Clearly, this argument's fortunate proponents inhabit a sphere in which pure reason and gentle kindness prevail. The rest of us can only sigh in envy and go back to the gritty business of surviving this planet.
Genuine experience is an aggregate of events and individual circumstances from which conclusions are drawn and tested over time. It is the wisdom to be had from what is commonplace, which is why the consensus that grows from shared experience has an authority that transcends mere custom. Recourse to that civilizing authority is one of the things that breathes ethical life into the day-to-day administration of our courts and the production of newspapers and newscasts.
It is, in other words, everything a celebrity trial is not.
A celebrity trial is the legal equivalent of a hothouse. Everything inside is unnatural and exaggerated, and much that goes on around it, including most of the media coverage, is distorted by competitive intensity and morbid curiosity.
Some years ago, when the awesome wreckage of the McMartin preschool case finally collapsed, The Times' editorial writer assigned to cover legal affairs was asked by his editors to reexamine the entire case and to produce a series of editorials to be grandly titled, "The Lessons of McMartin." After a bit of research, the writer returned and informed his disappointed bosses that there would be no series.
