Ten Years of Court TV
By TOM KERTES

Though only celebrating its tenth anniversary, the relatively new Court TV has already taught a lot to America about America.

“Our original mission was to provide transparency to the public about our justice system in the United States,” said Dick Beahrs, President and CEO of Court TV, in a recent telephone interview. “The goal was to allow the kind of open access to trials that our constitution guarantees us and the kind of light that C-SPAN has shone upon our political system.”

The popularity of the network came as no surprise to industry insiders, given that trials, and a mixture of reality TV and soap operas, can provide far more action than the talking-head politicians of C-SPAN. Still, the mission has evolved. “We’ve decided to broaden our scope,” Beahrs said. “Once the courts go dark, we decided to spice things up with creative prime time programming, such as original documentaries that deal with some aspects of law and order. We also bought some reruns of broadcast network series about the justice system, like “Homicide: Life On the Street,” “COPS,” “Profiler” and “NYPD Blue.” ”

Court TV has turned out to be about more than ‘just’ the American legal system. The gavel-to-gavel coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial displayed not only the racial divide that still troubles our country, it also revealed the fact that there are two systems of justice in the US: one for the rich and famous, who can afford to hire a legal ‘Dream Team’, and the other for everyone else.

The Menendez brothers’ trial sounded another painful wake-up call for America. “We learned that in this overly Oprah-ized era that we live in, an entire new host of pseudo-psychological excuses can be used to escape responsibility—successfully, too,” explained Fred Graham, Court TV’s Chief Editor.

Naturally, with crime, punishment and gore as the very life-blood of Court TV, the network could not remain untouched by the controversy around the impact of TV violence on children. In response, after extensive research done with Cable in the Classroom and the National Middle School Association, the network has developed “Choices and Consequences,” a program aimed at re-sensitizing children to the impact of violent acts. “It’s an hour-long Town Hall format with kids and community leaders openly discussing grassroots issues causal to violence,” said Scoot McPherson, the Program Director. “We show brief clips of some of our significant trials, then examine in depth the decision-making process that led the defendants into that particular situation.”

An independent year-long UCSB study has shown the middle school program to have impacted so immensely on kids’ empathy skills that Court TV is currently developing a high school curriculum as well.

“This is a particularly opportune time for us to celebrate our tenth anniversary,” Beahrs said. “We feel that we are providing a better-than-ever quality service. And the public is responding to us in record numbers as well.”