Here Comes The Judge

No stranger to television, Judge Joe Brown lands his own show.

by Jim Hanas

tarting Monday, recently reelected Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown will buck a trend: He is a judge and he’ll play one on TV.

Judge Joe Brown, one of a slew of People’s Court-type offerings appearing this fall, debuts next week, paired up with the very successful Judge Judy show on WLMT-TV Channel 30, starting daily at 10 a.m.

Brown is no stranger to television. Between occasional news reports on his adventures in alternative sentencing to his presiding role in James Earl Ray’s attempts to win a new trial, he has often been in the national spotlight. And that’s where Big Ticket Television, the division of Spelling Entertainment that also produces Judge Judy, found him.

“They came and found me,” says Brown. “[They] came out here and said, ‘Do you want a TV show?’”

From there, Brown says, “things led to things.”

More than 60 episodes of the show are already in the can, but Brown still has a rigorous schedule ahead of him. It calls for taping 10 to 15 cases a day for two days every two weeks, time Brown says will either come out of weekends or vacation time.

How does he like it so far?

“It’s hard work,” he says, noting that, unlike in a real courtroom, he has to play all the roles: plantiff’s attorney, defendant’s attorney, and judge. Those who sympathize with prosecutors in the James Earl Ray case, as the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals did in early March when Brown was removed from the case, might argue that that’s not so much different from a real Joe Brown courtroom.

And the promos for his new show certainly play up Brown’s reputation as an iconoclast. Punctuated with an in-your-face gavel, literally, Brown talks about alternative sentencing, his background in South Central L.A., and the “social engineering” he undertakes from the bench.

“Witness real justice from a judge who’s making a real difference,” booms the voice-over.

The keyword being “real.” Of all the TV judges out there – a recent Time magazine piece counted five, six if you count Judge Julie of Playboy’s Sex Court – Brown is the only one who is currently on the bench.

Brown says there is no conflict. He says TV courts serve to educate the public about the judicial function of government and that the American Bar Association approves.

“Not only is this an approved activity, it is an encouraged activity,” he says.

Brown says he doesn’t know how much he’ll make from the show, but that he’ll be paid a percentage of the gross.

Backlash Backing Off?

Here’s a shocker: According to a report just released by NewsTV, a Kansas-based television production and research firm, “coverage related to the grand jury investigation of President Bill Clinton dominated all aspects of national news programming in the month of August.”

Three hundred and three segments about the investigation ran on morning news programs, while 23 ran on network news magazines during the month. By comparison, only one Clinton-related story ran on a network newsmagazine in August 1996, two months before his bid for reelection. Coverage ran the gamut from the serious to the frivolous, from 60 Minutes’ look at Kenneth Starr’s investigation to Primetime Live’s unveiling of Paula Jones’ new, surgically altered profile.

Still, there’s evidence out there in Studyland that the public’s view of the Clinton/Lewinsky media monster is softening, now that the president has confessed that the allegations are true.

According to a poll conducted by the New York-based Media Studies Center the week after Clinton’s contrite address to the nation, 49 percent of those polled rated media coverage of the story as either “excellent” or “good,” up from 36 percent when the story broke in January. But the media wasn’t out of the woods yet. Sixty-two percent of those polled disagreed that the story merited the amount of coverage it has received.

For that, we needed a poll.