The Tonya Harding imbroglio might have worked in this regard. The greatest virtue of this assortment may be its journalistic bent. The authors seem to have modeled modern journalism in the act of describing it. And these stories can be interpreted like any other anthropological artifacts, as cultural indicators. Let us explore this possibility.
Mass media tend to exaggerate and exploit drama.
The essays in this volume tend to focus on human interest, drama, and titillation even to the detriment of documenting trials as media events, an enterprise that the subtitle stated. The chapter on the Scopes Trial, for example, tracks conventional accounts of Bryan versus Darrow far too much and adds too little to understanding the reportage of H. L. Mencken and others. Mass media also tend to play up the personal at the expense of the institutional and historical. Too many chapters trumpet defendants and attorneys as dramatic personages, which may be why the concluding chapter is so inconclusive. Just as mass media tend to reduce events to bites, case studies that range between ten and eighteen pages and average thirteen pages must oversimplify and overlook.