The audience was historic. Accused of having put the security of the United States at risk by keeping confidential documents after his departure from the White House, Donald Trump was called to appear on Tuesday, June 13, before the federal court in Miami. All the press was obviously mobilized, but in the race for information on the judicial and political future of the former president – who will seek a new mandate in 2024 – stood a major obstacle: no communication was possible between the courtroom and the outside, the judge having prohibited the public as well as reporters from entering it with the slightest electronic device, cameras, computers and telephones included.
How did CNN manage to reveal before all its competitors that the 45th President of the United States had pleaded not guilty to the thirty-seven charges brought against him? The scheme, which the channel unveiled on Wednesday, is just as incredible as it is anachronistic, in a country where (almost) nothing escapes the cameras or the taxpayers’ demand for transparency with regard to their institutions. .
It all started on Monday, the day before the hearing, with the dispatch of a reconnaissance mission. Tasked with inspecting the Miami courthouse, the CNN team spotted two public telephone sets there, forgotten relics of the wired past of telecoms (the last cabins in New York were dismantled in 2022), but the only way to communicate quickly with the outside. Noah Gray, the channel’s senior coordinator for special events, can then formulate his plan.
Transparency and impartiality
It turns out that he himself grew up in Miami, where he attended Palmetto Senior High School, and contacts a professor of broadcast journalism to offer to temporarily hire some of his students. The affair seems to have been settled very quickly. The next day, the courtroom is packed. Alongside Hannah Rabinowitz and Tierney Sneed, the two CNN reporters armed only with their notepads, are a handful of teenagers. When Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s attorney, announces, “We firmly plead ‘not guilty,'” reporters tear out the pages where they’ve just scribbled those words and hand them to the students, who rush to find their classmate assigned to stand guard outside. one of the cabins. All he has to do is call in to announce the information, but there’s a catch: the booths only allow local calls.
However, the problem was anticipated. Another team is stationed in a van that serves as the chain’s mobile headquarters. On board is a local production assistant, whose mobile phone number is accessible. It is he who relays with Brad Parks, regional director of the investigation antenna, who can in turn transmit the information to the Washington office, where it is validated and then announced on the antenna, before it on all other networks (television channels). “In all my years in the field, I have never been involved in such a complex telephone operation,” Noah Gray said at the end of the hearing.
Not only did the operation show great inventiveness, but it fueled the debate on the transparency of a federal justice system often considered archaic and braced on its principles. As far as Donald Trump is concerned, the sketches of the forensic cartoonists will be the only visual pieces to be added to the archives of this historic indictment.
Many legal experts have since deemed it necessary to reform the rules in the name of transparency and impartiality. “I think it’s about people’s justice, it’s our taxpayers’ money that’s funding it, and all Americans should be able to see it,” said Neal Katyal, former acting attorney general. , on MSNBC. His arguments seem all the more well-founded since, whatever the prohibitions, the press always ends up circumventing them, as Tuesday’s hearing showed.
In France, except in exceptional cases, cameras are still prohibited, but journalists have the possibility of transmitting their information using telephones or computers. In the United States, television channels are, on the contrary, so omnipresent in the courts, and all the more so since the trial of O. J. Simpson, in 1994, that the absence of images can almost seem suspect.
« Hyperpolarisation »
“Since the 1980s, many trials, including in the preliminary appearance phase, such as the one that took place on Tuesday, have been televised and Americans have gotten used to it, recalls Marie-Christine Bonzom, political scientist, journalist and specialist in the United States, where she worked for almost thirty years (1989-2018). This time, the judge did not want the hearing to turn into a media circus. I believe in giving him that power,” she said.
The press can always assert the right to inform to ask to cover the trials, but in politically sensitive cases, moreover when they relate to confidential documents, the publicity of the proceedings would, according to the expert, only fueling the “hyperpolarization” of American society. “The United States has reached such a degree of partisan division that it contaminates all spheres of public life, including the judiciary and the media. Today, everyone must ask themselves questions, both the media and the judiciary and the two parties that dominate political life,” she concludes.
“The supporters of the media coverage of the debates believe that viewers must see everything in the name of transparency, but the question is what the public has lost”, observes Anne Deysine, jurist and professor emeritus at the University of Paris Nanterres, who has, among other things, published The United States and Democracy (L’Harmattan, 2019). “This time, nothing was missed but Donald Trump’s silence and his conspicuously sulky expression. The journalists were in the room and the slightest breach would have been reported, including in the absence of images. Conversely, the presence of the cameras would have run the risk that everything would be “sensationalized” and that the lawyers would overplay their score for the media, which would only have accentuated the polarization”, she also concludes.