I realized what's really unprecedented about the media coverage of Donnie's trial [View all]

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I think this is the first major trial that the media is covering largely from the point of view of the defendant.

Most trials involve a defendant who swears they're innocent and being railroaded. Sometimes they are, more often they're not, but in any event their protests and complaints are generally not really newsworthy. Usually the focus is on the evidence and the witnesses.

But thanks to the media's continued insistence of giving Donnie all the airtime possible, which he's more than happy to take, his baseless accusations of partisan persecution and judicial conflicts and supposed violations of his first amendment rights are front and center in the coverage, bringing the audience to identify with him as the victim of the process instead of the obvious crook he is.

OJ was a media circus and the defense got more airtime than is typical in more trials, but I don't recall ever feeling like the media was taking his side or encouraging anyone to identify with him or have sympathy for him as a victim of some kind of wrong. If anything the media expectation was that he was guilty and likely would be found guilty. Which is its own problem.

But with Donnie, they seem eager to grant legitimacy and airtime and repetition to his fact-free lie that the case is meritless and that the prosecutors and judges are only doing it to smear him for political purposes. A ludicrous claim, yet the media keeps repeating it.