It’s hardly news that weekday “Judge” shows are reliant on the dimwitted — as plaintiffs, defendants and viewers. But an installment of “Judge Joe Brown,” seen here on Fox 5 last week, seemed unusually exploitive of a defendant who seemed intellectually incapable of defending himself in any court, let alone one on national TV
The case was about a mother suing her young adult son for an angry rampage during which he damaged her kitchen. Her son admitted that he did an estimated $376 in damage because, “I got angry.” He was, at first, second and third glance, a pathetic soul.
No matter, Judge Brown ripped the young man, up, down, sideways. “I’m going to make an example of you,” he declared, then loudly cited the defendant for “malicious, tortuous and deliberate” destruction. Brown tacked on another $4,000 in “punitive” fines.
And when Brown finished his spew against the young man, the courtroom applauded. Just then, the camera cut back to the defendant and his mother. Obviously clueless, the young man was seen applauding.
Is there a place on TV for the fair-minded to turn for news? Or are the fair-minded now considered a subversive political group — or worse, a movement — that can best be dealt with by ignoring it, thus enabling its extinction?
Last week, 45 miles from Manhattan, an Ocean County, NJ judge sentenced 43-year-old Jose Diaz, a career criminal, to 25 years in prison for the recruitment and transport of young men whom he delivered to Lakewood, NJ. In order to rob Orthodox Jews who populate the town. Diaz targeted Orthodox Jews because he deemed them easy, non-resistant targets.
Diaz’s recruits, Devon Hardy, 20 and Timothy Swift, 19, beat one Jew with a baseball bat before stealing his money and laptop, and left a rabbi robbed, beaten and stabbed — four times — in front of his home.
Having tracked this story since it broke in a Jersey newspaper last year through the sentencing of all three of the convicted, culminating with Diaz’s, Nov. 20, I found no coverage of it — not a mention, not a word — by any local or national news telecast.
Imagine, though, if the ring leader had been white and recruited young men to target racial minorities for robberies and assaults with deadly weapons. The TV coverage would have been intense, relentless; a conga line of TV news trucks, reporters and camera crews would have made the short trip south, over and over, from Manhattan. Sound bites from activists decrying racist white America would have been plentiful.
And this ugly story, certainly worthy of attention, would have been covered, then covered some more, and never forgotten.
But in this case the targeted and beaten victims were white, Jews, for that matter. And the ring leader was Hispanic. So the story never got off the ground, let alone made the air.
Not that the fair-minded would even know of such a story. So it hardly matters that those who figure that you don’t fight inequality with inequality, were shut out, once again.
Given that for many years he was a practicing — and respected — TV journalist, it’s painful to watch how NBC News has turned Lester Holt into another corporate sales clerk. As host of the “Today”’s weekend edition, Holt must now regularly bang the drums for NBC Universal goods.
Last Saturday, Holt again was shilling for “White Collar,” a show on USA Network, part of the NBC Universal family. Holt interviewed the show’s two stars. In 1990, as a CBS newsman, Holt received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award.
When did George Lopez land a role in the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz”? With annoying, distracting pop-up ads for Lopez’s TBS show appearing during TBS’ presentations of the movie, one might have confused him with the Wicked Witch of the Lower Part of Your Screen.