At the end of the day, the Mendez trial courtroom in Ft. Myers, FL, erupted in true drama: two witnesses testified in highly dramatic—and highly questionable—ways about the last moments (presumably) of victim Whitney Mendez’s life. Now the whole trial is in limbo until tomorrow morning.

I recommend the Ft. Myers www.news-press.com video archives if you didn’t see this.

This week has been an interesting court-broadcast experience. I’ve found much to admire in TruTV’s new format and much to dislike.

The Good

Since moving from NY to GA, TruTV’s In Session program has been much more informative and interesting than it was in the past, in several ways:

1. The program extends from 9:00 a.m. ET to 3:00 a.m. ET, rather than being broken into three segments; this makes it easier for me to record, skim through, and delete.
2. The anchors of In Session are both lawyers, but they don’t focus on their personal opinions (as some previous anchors did)—they focus on eliciting the opinions of their guests, all of whom have been providing detailed, technical commentary.
3. The commentary is truly information—but, on the down side, the speakers are often overly dramatic, and the points could also be provided after the fact (in true journalistic form), as opposed to during live broadcast, and still be informative.

The Bad and the Ugly

On the other hand, the short-comings of commercial TV broadcasts of trials have also become apparent:

1. Trials are interrupted at arbitrary points with lengthy, obnoxious, irrelevant commercials, including commercials for the stupid prime-time TruTV lineup.
2. Private-citizen witnesses are broadcast nationwide, when they have no desire to become national figures.

The Florida www.news-press.com website (sponsored by a Florida newspaper chain) is also streaming the Mendez trial live. They not only do not interrupt the trial with commercials, unlike CNN they don’t even require viewers to watch three commercials before the video will play. What is even more impressive, they stream the entire trial live, and then they archive each day’s session for “On Demand” replay. This—IMHO—is the way it should be done. Commentaries should be provided after the fact and in separate “broadcast” sessions.

As they used to say when TVs had a “dial,” tune in tomorrow to see if the judge declares a mistrial in Florida v Mendez.