Now that Donald J. Trump has been indicted by special prosecutor Jack Smith for alleged federal crimes, the issue of televising his trial has taken on greater and greater urgency.
Opinion pieces in such Democratic-leaning venues as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Hill have all called for allowing cameras into the federal courtroom. Over two dozen Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by Adam Schiff, signed a letter asking the Judicial Conference to “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.”
Not televising the proceedings, the arguments goes, forces Americans to rely on summaries of the proceedings likely to be “highly opinionated, one-sided, boiled down to a few words or catchy phrases or taken out of context or come from people with undisclosed credentials or agendas or be just plain made up.”
On the other hand, allowing the public to watch the complete proceedings (presumably without ads) would grant the trial a credibility it would not otherwise have. As Laurence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut put it, “Nothing promotes trust of facts better than what we see with our own eyes.”
Or as Schiff et al. put it in their letter, “If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.” In sum, “Americans Will Believe the Trump Verdict Only if They Can See It.”
The proponents for televising naively believe that seeing is believing. But as Thomas Kuhn showed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we never see the world “objectively.” Rather, we interpret a paradigm which tells us what’s important, what’s not important, and what things mean. Seeing is not believing. In fact, the opposite is the case: believing is seeing.
Let me give two examples: one from fiction, Shakespeare’s tragedy, Othello: The Moor of Venice, and the other from Galileo’s lived experience.
Faced with Iago’s insinuations, Othello does not instantly believe that Desdemona has been unfaithful. Instead, he, reasonably, demands evidence, and he demands evidence of a particular sort: “ocular proof.” Anticipating Tribe and Aftergut, Othello trusts only what he sees with his own eyes, because after all, seeing is believing.
So Iago sets up a conversation between Cassio and himself which Othello overhears. But while Iago and Cassio are talking about a prostitute Cassio frequents, Othello thinks they are talking about Desdemona. Iago understands that Othello is not going to interpret what he sees objectively because “jealousy must conster [construe] / Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures, and light behaviors / Quite in the wrong.”
For complicated reasons, but mainly due to Othello having internalized Iago’s racist tropes, Othello wants to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful. He warns Iago, “Be sure thou prove my love a whore,” and a bit later, “Make me to see it.” Iago obliges. He gives Othello the “ocular proof” the Moor demands. But Othello does not believe because he sees (or overhears); he sees what he believes.
Othello, however, is a play, not reality. What happened to Galileo, however, is different.
After Galileo had taken a carnival toy and improved it, he did something nobody had done before: he looked up, and what he saw had the potential to rock civilization to its core. Instead of a static universe in which everything revolved around the earth, Galileo saw moons orbiting around Jupiter, and the surface of our own moon was filled with craters.
The cosmology everyone believed was wrong, and so, by implication, was Christianity’s theology. As John Donne famously put it, “The new philosophy calls all in doubt … ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”
All people had to do was use their eyes, and they would see the truth.
But that’s not what always happened. When his fellow astronomer, Giovanni Magini, looked through the “optic tube” (as the telescope was called), he and the other dignitaries who gathered to witness Galileo’s miracle refused to believe what they saw. Magini and the other professors had no problem believing that mountains and ships far distant suddenly appeared much closer. But “in the heavens it deceives.” The moons around Jupiter they called “fictitious,” and they accused Galileo of “hawking a fable.”
The response is unsurprising. Seeing a ship or a mountain much closer challenges nothing. But seeing objects floating around Jupiter, and a lunar surface that is anything but smooth, that contradicted their fundamental sense of reality. So Magini and the “many others” who gathered for the event, not by any means stupid or gullible men, rejected the “ocular proof” before them. Like Othello, they saw what they believed, and rejected anything that contradicted that belief.
None of which is to say that Trump’s trials should not be televised. They should. The world should have the opportunity to watch every moment of the proceedings, which doubtless will provide hours of entertainment. Especially if Trump himself takes the stand.
But as with the January 6 hearings, do not expect to change any minds. Those disposed to believe that Trump is guilty will find more damning evidence, and those who think Trump is the victim of a witch hunt (which is most of the Republican Party) will not be convinced, no matter how high the mountain of evidence.
Because people do not believe what they see; they see what they believe.
Peter C. Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Salon, Newsweek, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His next book will be “Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature” (Routledge).
