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Criminal justice has always captivated the American public. Whether cases involving celebrities—Johnny Depp, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, O.J. Simpson—or ones that make new ones: the Menendez brothers, Casey Anthony.
Court reporting is as storied a beat as exists in the traditional media. But in recent years, coverage of high-profile cases has found a new home, and established new superstars, on YouTube.
“In regular media coverage, you get snippets of a case, but rarely do you get to see gavel-to-gavel coverage,” says Emily Baker, a former deputy district attorney in Los Angeles and a YouTube creator who has made a career out of covering legal drama on the platform.
Her videos run as long as seven hours, as she explains legal terms or unpacks obscure decisions that might otherwise go over the heads of non-attorneys. “Depth of conversation is really constrained on legacy media,” Baker says. “It’s ‘What do you think of this? You have two minutes: go.’ And it’s like, it’s law—you need more than a sound bite.”
It prompts such fascination, she says, because “court is wild—people do funny things.” By people, she means the judge, jury, and legal teams, not just the big names. Since 2020, Baker has devoted her YouTube channel, TheEmilyDBaker, to breaking down viral cases of the day, including the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh, the patriarch of a powerful legal family in South Carolina; Karen Read, accused of manslaughter in the death of her boyfriend in Boston; the case of the retired optometrist who sued Gwyneth Paltrow over a ski-slope crash; Alec Baldwin’s trial for the on-set death of a cinematographer on the movie Rust; and the defamation case between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Baker is a part of what is sometimes called “LawTube,” lawyers with YouTube channels.
YouTube has long appealed to attorneys across specialties––immigration, real estate, divorce––as a place to share their expertise and increase business. Those covering viral cases tend to get the most viewers. Channels like Legal Eagle, with over three million subscribers, and Law & Crime Network, with over six million, are some of the most popular; Baker currently boasts some eight hundred thousand subscribers. Other channels like LegalBytes, NatalieLawyerChick, and LawyerYouKnow operate on a smaller scale but with highly engaged audiences.
LawTubers reached a critical mass of audience and influence after the case between Depp and Heard, Baker says: “There were millions and millions of people watching that verdict come in.” She livestreamed proceedings, using a feed from Court TV, and posted a video every day of the trial. She also had “Lawyer reacts” videos where she offered more of her expertise and thoughts on the day’s drama, and answered questions live. In the end, she created almost seventy videos for the trial. Several of them have over a million views.
Dr. John and Lauren Matthias, the husband-and-wife team behind the channel Hidden True Crime, explore another angle on court reporting. John, a veteran clinical and forensic psychologist, and Lauren, a former broadcast journalist, started Hidden True Crime as a podcast. The first season was devoted to covering the Lori and Chad Daybell “doomsday murders”––Lauren reported while John examined. It garnered several thousand listeners, who encouraged the Matthiases to migrate to YouTube, where they now have over two hundred thousand subscribers. Their YouTube coverage of Lori Daybell’s trial alone features ninety videos in one playlist.
“I learned that people are really seeking information and analysis,” Lauren says. She used to work in television news, where she would spend days and weeks investigating stories only to have a few minutes to tell them. Now, with her husband—whom she met while reporting on a murder case—they can unfold the much more complicated stories behind gruesome crimes. “This notion that somehow people are all good or all bad is silly,” John says. “It’s part of understanding the entire picture.”
They cover not only what is decided in court but other aspects of a story. For the case of the Delphi murders, named for the Indiana city in which two girls were murdered by a man while out on a walk in 2017, Lauren visited the crime scene and interviewed investigators. John discussed the psychological elements of the case. When the perpetrator was brought to trial last year, access to court proceedings was strictly limited––no cameras or social media allowed. Lauren attended and took notes on pen and paper, which she then relayed to the Hidden True Crime audience. They now have a playlist of fifty-seven videos with well over a million views.
The Matthiases see themselves not as a replacement for breaking news or local coverage but as a supplement. “I’m always asking, How can we add value to this case? Is there something about a particular case that opens up something about human beings that is worth talking about?” John, who spent much of his career performing psychological evaluations and risk assessments for court, says. “In other words, a lot of cases in crime you might see are about, say, psychopaths, but it’s the same old story. You know, you got a crazy guy that goes out and murders people, right? We don’t want to cover that story.”
Baker sees her channel’s coverage in a similar light. “I love doing legal analysis, because I can watch what’s going on in court all day and cover the things that might seem very dry but are deeply impactful,” she says. “Being able to share it in a long-form way matters, because it’s very hard to distill law into two sentences.
“In my work as an attorney, you have to see the strength in the other side, no matter what you believe, when you’re putting forward a case. So I try to bring that into my coverage,” she says. She loves to have an audience that doesn’t agree on a case or feels negative about the people involved. “We go into a case and they’re like, ‘I don’t even know why we’re here—I think this person’s guilty.’ My goal is always to keep an open mind—let’s watch till the end of the case and see what happens.” In the Paltrow case, she says, “it was fascinating because, by the end of the trial, we got to a place of I don’t like her, but this lawsuit shouldn’t have happened. And that is not an intellectual exercise everybody deals with in their day-to-day life.”
With seeking complexity and nuance comes navigating impassioned and divided audiences. Both channels enable live chats that can get heated. The Matthiases explore the psyches of people who commit murder, and that can upset viewers who see excuses for violence or exploitation of tragedy.
In the case of the murder of Madeline Soto, a young girl in Florida, the duo received heavy backlash for interviewing the parents of the accused murderer. (They, like many others, asked the Matthiases to cover them in the hope of bringing more nuance to the notion that they had raised a monster.) The accused’s mother said she wanted to be there when her son was electrocuted. “And she started crying, because she’s like, ‘We were there when he was born. We’ll be there with him when he dies,’” Lauren says. “Trying to understand that is a part of understanding humanity.”
“If we want to understand why this happened, we need to know his family, where he grew up and how they were,” John says. “People get in our chats and say, ‘Oh, so-and-so is a monster,’ but I don’t think it’s going to get us anywhere by dehumanizing people all the time.”
Baker, too, seeks to humanize. “Most people never walk through those doors into a courtroom,” she says. “Courts are made to be intimidating, uneasy, and solemn settings, but making that more human, I think, allows the audience to feel more comfortable engaging in their own legal system.” Audience members have told her they now look forward to jury duty, because they know what to pay attention to.
Walking the line between facts, expertise, opinions, speculation, and vitriol for tens of thousands of viewers is a difficult proposition. Both operations are still modest––Baker has part-time staffers who work on operations, production, project management; the Matthiases have a part-time producer and personal assistant––and pale in comparison with the layers of managerial and legal support network news can offer staff. Still, they see their jobs as filling a legitimate void in the media space for the things people seem to want: an open forum, direct access to experts, a deep dive into frightening and stratified worlds.
“If the understanding gets lost, I think, to the viewer, it can feel very much like Well, that’s not fair,” Baker says. “I find that when people have more basis in understanding—even if they disagree with a result—if they still understand why it’s happening, that’s incredibly valuable.”
“People don’t want to deal with grief, loss, and suffering,” John Matthias says. Which is perhaps why, when it comes to violence, much of the traditional media can seek to flatten the complexities. “That’s what I think, in the end, we want to help teach. Tragedy––much like Greek tragedy––is inconsolable. There’s no answer.”
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