DA Says Robert Blake Jurors Were Stupid

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- District Attorney Steve Cooley says Robert Blake was "guilty as sin" and the jurors who acquitted him of murder were "incredibly stupid." …

"Quite frankly, based on my review of the evidence, he is as guilty as sin. He is a miserable human being," Cooley said Wednesday.

Blake's attorney, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, said the district attorney's attack on the jurors was inappropriate and "small-minded."

Juror Chuck Safko said: "To hear him say we aren't a smart jury is sour grapes. They didn't have a good case. Their case was built around witnesses who weren't truthful."

(Via AP Entertainment News.)

Update: The jurors want an apology, and the prosecutor continues to blame them for his inability to do his job:

"There was a failure in this case. It was not my prosecutor. It was not the work of LAPD. It was the jurors didn't quite get it," he said, conceding, however, "I could have phrased it differently."

"But bottom line it was the wrong verdict," he said. "Sometimes jurors should be held accountable for their mistakes."

Anyone want to go back and find appeals from this guy's office where he said the jury's verdict has to stand, and juries can't be held accountable for mistakes? What does this held accountable crap mean, anyway? Does he want to prosecute them for not rubber-stamping his case?

What an ass.

It's been almost exactly three years since Maryland Public Television fired Louis Rukeyser for, essentially, having gray hair and not being a shill for Time Warner corporate underwriter Fortune magazine.

Now the battle has killed both shows. Rukeyser's new show on CNBC went off the air in December because Rukeyser himself hadn't been on it since October 2003, due to ill health. But instead of letting him plan an orderly succession at Wall $treet Week, PBS's "let's revamp everything" management pushed him out the door, then fired him when he had the temerity to say on the air he'd be doing another show elsewhere (remember, this was public television, where things like that shouldn't matter [cough Tucker Carlson cough]).

And Wall $treet Week With Fortune? It's gone with the June 24 installment. After dumping Rukeyser for no good reason, the show never regained its audience or its underwriting dollars. Guess what hoodoo Maryland Public Television is using to explain its utter failure?

"We found there was not sufficient underwriter support to sustain the cost of production of a weekly series, especially when the audience has access to financial information and analysis 24 hours a day, seven days a week across Internet platforms," said Larry Hoffman, MPT's managing director of corporate communications.

Uh-huh. To continue quoting the Baltimore Sun:

Indeed, consumers have come to expect a continuous stream of financial information, said Anirban Basu, CEO of the Sage Policy Group and economic commentator on Baltimore's WYPR-FM. But, he added, one way to attract and retain audiences is through a star personality. In his estimation, Rukeyser was one of the best.

"Louis Rukeyser is a splendid personality - he really is," Basu said. "Not just a keen financial mind, not only a savvy investor, but a poet and an entertainer. That's just simply not easy to find - that's a rare combination. And that's what MPT was coming up against. From his opening monologue, to the kinds of guests he was able to attract and his ease in handling them, his show just all flowed so smoothly."

At the peak of its popularity, Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser, which cost $2 million annually to produce, was carried by 300 PBS stations and earned in excess of $6 million a year. It attracted 1.5 million viewers, one of the largest audiences of any weekly public television series.

That audience also was one of the most upscale, according to Gomery. "His target audience of people looking for investment advice was the perfect audience when it came to fund raising - people with money. And they were loyal, showing up every Friday night to hear him and the insiders he brought to the TV table. For a long time, Rukeyser and public television were a very happy couple," he said.

The first hints of a breakup occurred in May 2001 at a meeting in a downtown Baltimore hotel when MPT officials told Rukeyser that they wanted to reinvent his show in hopes of attracting younger viewers.

The strategy was part of an overall campaign by new PBS President Pat Mitchell to shake up signature series such as Masterpiece Theater and Wall Street Week. It was a disaster.

Indeed. No blaming the Bushies or the Clintonians here - the PBS board conducted an executive search and hired Mitchell in February 2002.

(though it probably is worth noting that before she pushed Rukeyser out to make room for Time Warner's Fortune, she was head of CNN Productions and Time Inc. Television...)