Failure to recognize the difference has, I believe, caused much of the judicial antipathy toward the visual media. Admittedly, an appetite for profit inspires the desire to televise court proceedings. That is hardly a disqualifying defect. It is also true that televising trials provides an inexhaustible pool of commercial diversion. This fact is irrelevant to the present issue.
Television merely expands the audience.
Another criticism focuses on the distorted view of the judicial process which televising a trial produces. This is a valid comment, raising a serious issue. The nature of television news broadcasting requires compressing a whole day's courtroom activity into perhaps one minute. Moreover, because television is such a visual, drama-oriented medium, what appears during the newscast may not be the most important event in terms of the trial and its eventual outcome. Nonetheless, the viewer begins to feel like a true spectator and to form judgments which, though resting on partial information at best, encourage an inappropriate certitude.