Word: camera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...countries. The son of a Shanghai banker, he was imprisoned in 1960 for criticizing the Soviet Union. After being released, immigrating to the U.S. in 1985 and becoming a citizen, he embarked on a crusade to publicize the nightmare of China's prison system. Using a hidden camera, he once sneaked into a Chinese tanning factory and filmed naked prisoners standing in vats of toxic chemicals. Last year, while he posed as a wealthy American searching for a kidney for a relative, the BBC filmed transplant recipients who told Wu that their organs had come from executed prisoners...
LIKE A BARNUM & BAILEY ADVANCE team, television crews caravaned into Union, South Carolina, weeks ago for the murder trial of Susan Smith. After unloading thousands of dollars' worth of equipment, scores of technicians invaded the town's 82-year-old courthouse, installing lights and vying for camera angles that accentuated the high ceilings. Meanwhile, lawyers debated whether the trial should be televised at all. Those in favor argued that live testimony would provide an opportunity to heal Union's wounds. Smith's lawyer, David Bruck, countered that potential witnesses feared an O.J. Simpson-type spectacle that would make them...
Judge William Howard Jr. agreed with the defense: "I know, for me, when there is a camera, there is an effect," he said. Then he gave the camera crews just five minutes to pack up and leave. Thus when Smith went on trial last week for the drowning murder of her two sons, the soft whirr of cameras was replaced by a far quainter sound--the scratches and squeaks of 10 sketch artists, plying their trade with color pencils and markers...
...Amendment's promise of a fair trial, an issue that has yet to be resolved by the Supreme Court. Instead, the legal community is assessing the fallout from the Simpson case--the media stalking of witnesses, the glut of pop books, the glamourization of commentators--and concluding that a camera lens does far more than just behold. Those who have been inside the Simpson courtroom note how lawyers have learned to turn their back to the camera when exchanging jokes and smirks. And though joking persists even after Judge Lance Ito enters the chamber, solemnity rules once the camera begins...
Others argue that cameras are not the problem, they are the solution. "The camera is the antidote to the media circus," contends Steven Brill, founder of Court TV. Besides, he adds, lawyers "showboat, even without cameras." Journalists fear that the twin decisions to bar cameras from the Smith and Klaas trials set a dangerous precedent. "The O.J. thing is an aberration," says Wade Ricks, a CNN field producer. "Trials can be handled in a thoughtful manner so that they instruct, enlighten and entertain." And Jane Kirtley of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press maintains that had the public...