When you’re chosen as a juror on a criminal case, you’re supposed to have no preconceived notion about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. In the recent Bill Cosby sexual assault case, Harrison Snyder fit that description to a T.
On Monday, “Good Morning America” ran an interview with Snyder, who didn’t offer any real revelations about the deliberations that led to the unanimous guilty verdict, but told interviewer Linsey Davis that he had virtually no knowledge of Cosby before the trial. That’s understandable, since Snyder is only 22, so “The Cosby Show” ended four years before he was born. Of course, it ran in reruns on multiple outlets for the next couple of decades (until the claims against Cosby became so overwhelming that no TV network would air them any longer), but it’s certainly possible that Snyder didn’t see them, for whatever reason.
I had no quibble with that until I realized that Harrison Snyder isn’t a cord cutter who didn’t have access to cable channels full of rerun. Rather, Snyder isn’t plugged into anything. That became apparent in the next part of the interview, which stunned me, when Snyder said that, before the trial, he knew nothing about the allegations against Cosby: “I don’t watch the news. Ever. So I didn’t even know what he was on trial for.” Then Davis asked whether the #MeToo Movement had any impact on his decision-making process. Snyder replied, “No, I only found out about it after I got home and I looked online to see what everything was. I didn’t really know about the #MeToo Movement.”
Perhaps I’m looking at this through the weary eyes of a lifelong news junkie. When I was Snyder’s age, long before the internet, Twitter, Facebook, etc., I stayed up-to-date on the news every day via print and broadcast media. I would have done that even if I hadn’t had a daily radio show and thus a need to know what was going on in the world. In the modern era, with so much information available 24/7 on almost any platform you choose, how can someone be so ignorant as to not have heard anything about two of the biggest stories of the last 12 months?
If I’d been Davis, I would have pressed this point, asking Snyder if he can name the president of the United States, if he’s worried about his privacy in light of recent Facebook revelations, if he’s heard about students being shot in high schools across the country, if he knows why teachers in several states went on strike, and what he thinks of the NFL changing its rules about catches.
Harrison Snyder probably doesn’t have an iota of information about anything that takes place outside his own home, which is why he was a perfect choice for the Cosby jury — and soon, a likely nominee for a cabinet position in Trump’s administration.