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As perverse as it may sound, the Casey Anthony trial is the kind of news event that TV executives dream of.
Three years in the making, the trial — in which 25-year-old Anthony is accused of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee — has gone from being a newsworthy case to one of the biggest ratings draws in recent memory.
Cable news channels and network news programs are scrambling to cover it as extensively as they can.
“It’s not about policy, it’s not about international relations,” says Scot Safon, executive vice president and general manager of HLN, the CNN sister channel that used to be called Headline News
“It’s a story that has a very, very strong human dimension to it,” he says. HLN’s decision early on to concentrate on the Anthony trial has translated into tremendous, across-the-board ratings increases since the trial began four weeks ago.
The audience for HLN’s “Nancy Grace” is up more than 150 percent since the “Tot Mom” trial started.
Dr. Drew Pinsky, who started a nightly 9 p.m. show on HLN with faint-pulse ratings last spring, has seen his ratings nearly triple since devoting his show to the trial — beating both Piers Morgan on CNN and Rachael Maddow on MSNBC nearly every night this month.
A special two-hour version of “Dateline,” NBC’s newsmagazine show that recapped the case so far — nothing new, just a recap — was the most-watched show of the night. The ratings nearly doubled ABC’s rival news show, “20/20.”
Local networks also recently shuffled scheduled programming — including the opening rounds of this weekend’s US Open golf tournament — to air trial coverage all day long, reports Broadcasting & Cable.
The presence of cameras in the courtroom is “the key differentiation between this being a trial that people are fascinated by and watching literally all the time,” Safon says.
In truth, with a few exceptions, TV news has been late in picking up just how much people are hungry to keep up with the trial.
That’s no longer the case.
Late last week, “The View” announced that it is devoting a daily segment to the case with legal reporter Chris Cuomo — the first time in the show’s history it will focus on one subject for an entire week.
“We think that there is a genuine interest in this story in daytime television because, at its core, Casey Anthony’s motherhood is on trial,” “The View” executive producer Bill Geddie said on Friday in a response to an e-mail query.
Inevitably, the Anthony trial will draw comparisons to the OJ Simpson trial.
But what turns the case into such addictive TV is that the Anthonys are “not famous people,” Safon says.
“On some level, this seems like such an unremarkable family. And yet, when you look underneath the hood, you’re seeing this incredibly complex group of people and relationships.”
For TV news execs who are jumping on the ship late (several news organizations declined to comment for this article), the bad news is that the trial, and its ratings blitz, may not have much longer to go.
The prosecution rested its case last week.
Unless Anthony takes the stand in her own defense — which appears unlikely — it seems the jury start deliberations as soon as next week.