A Day in Jury Rooms

I spent today fulfilling my jury duty requirement. Just before lunch, a judge requested forty of my peers and I into the courtroom. The voir dire (i.e., the jury selection process) began in earnest after lunch. One question the judge asked prospective jurors fascinated me. He asked how we the jurors followed the news. What did we read? What did we watch?

The answers were remarkable. The majority clearly didn't have or dedicate much time on a daily basis to following current news events. Think of them as scanners, typically of cable news programs and a couple of MSM websites. Some read local news via the web. Almost no one read a print version of a newspaper. Magazines never entered the conversation. In fact, the very idea of a printed newspaper or periodical seemed alien to this group. One person even claimed he got his news from watching The Daily Show. He wasn't kidding.

The information was in striking contrast to what I observed that morning in the crowded jury assembly room. My informal, visual survey showed that only four people, of the approximately one hundred in the room, had an iPad. (No one had a Nook or a Kindle.) About a dozen brought laptop computers. Just about everyone had a cellphone, and many in that group were actively texting and checking e-mail. Another dozen were reading from printed books, including hardcover versions. (The hardcovers surprised me.) Let's say another ten read printed newspapers or magazines. Some people watched the one television in the room, and seemed content with morning tube content such as The Rachael Ray Show and The View. Others did not immerse themselves in any sort of media, device, or book. They either talked with someone seated near them, or stayed to themselves. Ironically, I finished a paperback version of David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, an informed history of selected, elite American media and its interaction with the nation's social, political, and cultural currents from World War II through Watergate. I wondered what he would have thought of the media choices in today's jury rooms. (A 2003 interview of Halberstam is linked here.)

It's not often one can view a cross section of the local population and gain insight into how they obtain information. The jury assembly room, and the trial judge's focused questions in voir dire, provided some surprising results. My conclusion was that print newspapers are in serious trouble, and I can only hope that comedians are not this decade's version of Walter Cronkite.

The poster publicizes the late Sidney Lumet's movie 12 Angry Men.