On Thursday morning, I turned on my satellite TV to surf 24-hour news
programs, as I worked on the computer on various projects.  To my horror, Fox News had gone to continuous coverage of the train wreck known as the Anna Nicole Smith body custody trial.  As a lawyer, I watched a few minutes of it.  It was horrible, but fascinatingly, it kept getting worse and worse as it went along.

It was like reading a truly dreadful book or watching a dreadful movie that you know is rotten.  But you keep reading or watching to see if it can get even worse.  And this one did.

I won't comment on the legal aspects of this case.  I agree with many other commentators who said the case should have been decided on an obvious point, in a hearing lasting perhaps 20 minutes, tops.

I have to make a few comments about Judge Larry Seidlin.  I've dealt with hundreds of judges, at every level from District Court (lowest level
"police" court in Baltimore) to the US Supreme Court.  I've seen judges who were characters, or fancied themselves as comedians.  But, I've never before seen the likes of Judge Seidlin. 

Early in his career he was a cab driver in the Bronx.  I conclude that you
can take the cab driver out of the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx out of the cab driver.

A local, legal website in Broward County says that this judge is a victim of his own "inner comedian."  I can believe it.  He rambled.  He repeated
himself.  He talked at length arriving at no known point.  There are people who have microphone syndrome.  Confronted with a microphone, they fall in love with the sound of their own voices, and start talking interminably about essentially nothing.

Judge Seidlin also committed reversible errors by the bushel, in my opinion. Most of the testimony that he took in this case was inadmissible and irrelevant to the one real issue presented.  The best analogy to how he "ran" his courtroom was a classic Superbowl commercial which began with cowboys ridin' and whompin'.  As the shot widened, you realized they were herding cats.  The cats were running every which way and on top of each other, like the gaggle of lawyers in Seidlin's courtroom.

But that wasn't the half of what made this spectacle so awful.

Consider the judgments the editors at Fox News, and all other news agencies, made as they decided to go wall to wall (or nearly that) with that story. As Michelle said to me, this was driven by the fact that many/most men go gaga over blond hair and large boobs on a woman, even if neither the hair color nor the boobs are real. 

Couple that with the fact that this unfortunate woman wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed when she was sober - and when she was high on booze, drugs, whatever, she became as dumb as a hoe handle.  The last pathetic aspect as that everyone in that courtroom was trying to stay on the financial gravy train created by Ms. Smith - never mind that she was now dead.

If anyone in that courtroom turns out to have been both honest and capable, I will cheerfully apologize to that exception to the rule.

Until then, I condemn the participants in this pathetic circus, and I
condemn the American audiences who watched this empty farce.  The "news" media are not in the business of providing the most important information in clear fashion.  Their job is to "attract eyeballs."  The more people who are watching whatever drivel is on the screen, the more money advertisers will pay for their spots.

The dumbing down of what is called news started in 1977, when ABC News put Roone Arledge, then in charge of its Sports Division, in charge of its News Division.  The network was, unfortunately, correct in its judgment.  News is really entertainment, except with unpaid actors and unpaid scripts.

The continuing coverage of Anna Nicole Smith, never mind that she'd dead, is scraping the bottom of that particular barrel.

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