Pro wrestling manager Bobby Heenan once said that there were only two things that scared him about wrestling fans: "they can vote and they can breed." Heenan's quip also fits all the Court TV/Nancy Grace/ Rita Cosby fans out there. But I would add two points:
There are so many of them
They can sit on juries
Apparently there are millions of Americans who obsessively follow whatever crime story is hot at the moment. They watch it on TV, they read about it on blogs, they play detective in comments and discussion boards. They speculate and pick sides.
You know they are dying to get on a jury to do it for real.
This presents a serious challenge to our jury system. It is one thing to talk about the presumption of innocence when jurors have little information about the case and have not taken a position before coming to court. The popularity of crime stories on TV and the internet means that more and more potential jurors are making up their minds before the trial and doing their own "fact finding."
That's worrisome because one of the main points of Changing Minds by Howard Gardner is that it is hard for any of us to change our own minds. We do not, on the whole, accept new facts and revise our theories. Rather, we interpret or disregard the new information to make it fit our theories. This is not a matter of IQ or lack of education. He points out that intellectuals are "particularly susceptible" to removing cognitive dissonance by "reinterpreting" the facts. Among the forces that exacerbate this tendency to lock-in a theory are emotional commitment, public commitment (pride makes it hard to climb down when everyone is watching), and an absolutist personality. You can find plenty of all three any where crime fans congregate.
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