IGF CultureWatch

This will not be helpful.

Actors reading the (hastily transcribed by amazing people who, for all their amazingness are not court reporters) reports of testimony of witnesses in the Prop. 8 case is Exhibit A in why trials that many members of the public will be interested in should be available directly.

The first problem is the one that court transcripts have always had, the enormous difference between the cold words that a witness has pronounced on the stand and how he or she has said them: intonation, body language, inflection, etc. Judges and jury members do not just hear the words witnesses utter, they watch the witnesses. Credibility is, in no insignificant part, found in the way words are said, or the manner of the witness. Those are things that no transcript can portray, which is something I have learned directly after many years of having done appeals based on only the record of the trial.

The second problem is that we don't, here, have even an assuredly accurate transcript of the words yet. Court reporters will provide those eventually, which will be astronishingly accurate, given the fact that reporters are needlessly, manually performing a function that a simple iPhone Voice Memo app could perform perfectly and with no human effort (or expense) whatsoever. Here, though, the incredible livebloggers at Firedoglake and the Courage Campaign (who you should give some money to, in my opinion, for stepping into the void that the Supreme Court has created), doing the best they can, are providing general descriptions of some very academic testimony, getting only as many of the actual words spoken by the witnesses as they humanly can. They are also, naturally, guided by their own feelings about which side should win, which colors what they choose to transcribe and how. So the actors will be reading, not the actual words spoken, but only some of them, as well as some other kinds of summary which may have been influenced by human emotion rather than neutral transcription.

Finally, and most significantly, the actors, not having had the benefit of seeing the witnesses, will inevitably be giving their own spins to the imperfect text they will have -- and we will have absolutely no way of knowing how close or far their impressions are from the real thing that happened in that courtroom. It's impossible to even begin imagining how much mischief, creative license, and/or sheer whimsy will be involved in that. And, lacking any actual video record available to the public, we won't have anything to compare to their performances.

I'm not sure what to call the product of this inadvertent collaboration among real witnesses, nonprofessional transcribers, enthusiastic actors and possibly even a director or two. But "reenactment" is only the most charitable name for it.