MY LOCAL DISTRICT ATTORNEY is the dogged Alvin Bragg. We are both boosters of our shared hometown, in our somewhat different ways.   To begin the public radio edition of The Media Beat, I announce each week (part seriously and part self-mockingly) that I’m speaking from “the Media Capital of the World.” Bragg was 100% serious when he told his packed press conference this week that “New York is the Business Capital.” He went on to say, “we cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.”

Fundamentally, his case is framed in business and financial terms. He was speaking, of course, just after his 34 charges against an ex-president were unsealed and put to the accused in court. The overall statutory offense turned out to be “Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree,” a class E felony in State law.

Bragg was perhaps hoping to forestall Trump’s lawyers and media spin-merchants in any attempt to contest his approach, though so far he’s been unsuccessful: that erstwhile hitman, Sebastian Gorka yelled repeatedly to interviewers that the charges were if anything mere misdemeanors. Bragg emphasized during the presser that the offenses did rise to felonies because Trump’s records were falsified in order to conceal at least one other crime.

“Why did Donald Trump repeatedly make these false statements?” Bragg asked, a bit rhetorically. “The evidence will show that he did so to cover up crimes relating to the 2016 election.” These alleged electoral crimes, we should note, are not Bragg’s target in this case, as he keeps his focus tight on just the bookkeeping deception.

Bragg also said that at trial he will produce texts and emails exchanged between Trump and his circle, phone records, witness testimony and extensive documentation, as well as nine checks bearing Trump’s signature. These, it seems, will together demonstrate Trump’s intent to cover up other criminal behavior. “The trail of money and lies exposes a pattern,” he told the assembled scribes, stressing it was a pattern which “violates one of New York’s basic and fundamental business laws.”

The DA’s strategy is clearly to try in public to avoid the hottest of political potatoes that bob within this cauldron. Instead he portrays the offense as simply the kind of serious but workaday financial crime that regularly crosses his prosecutors’ desks in their dealings with Wall Street cheats. Bragg pithily described it from the podium saying cases such as this formed “the bread and butter of our white-collar work.”

ONE TROUBLING ASPECT OF THE CASE, though, is that the media are hardly keeping to this narrowly tightened focus. We wouldn’t expect them to. It’s either ironic, or maybe (just imagine!) a symptom of some endemic hypocrisy, that broadcasters repeatedly predicted ahead of time that the whole arraignment would be “spectacle” and a “circus,” even while their network bosses were applying for live cameras to be allowed into the courtroom. And when Judge Juan Merchan decided to allow only limited stills photography, the broadcasters then proceeded to turn it all into a circus anyway – and a sloppy one at that.

It was not the crisp Barnum and Bailey-style operation that the networks sometimes pride themselves on achieving, but a messy, blather-filled hodgepodge of miscues, overlapping remote inputs, audio drop-outs, and great gaps occurring when connections failed. And that’s just the tech aspect, constrained as it was by the well-known, unsurprisingly antiquated amenities in the State courthouse. When it came to actual editorial content, studio bloviators ranged widely and wildly over not just legal but also political speculation, with nary an effort to distinguish between the two areas. They claimed in self-justification that with Trumpian matters the two were pretty much the same, anyway. It was all very far from broadcast journalism’s finest hour.

But broadly rampaging, near-phantasmagorical reactions to the case can’t all be blamed on the media. The supposedly sophisticated commentariat, political activists and of course the lumpen supporters of self-serving politicians are all playing their part, plus even some of our top office-holders and candidates. For some characters in the melodrama it’s a unmissable fundraising opportunity. The Trump 2024 Campaign itself is already offering among its “merch” a T-shirt emblazoned with a mocked-up police mugshot of their innocent, persecuted leader (above right). $36 dollars to buy it; it’s a free gift if you pay $47 into campaign funds.

It has to be recognized that amid this madcap, histrionic climate, the very precision and painstaking narrowness of the Bragg case against Trump could end up being seen as weaknesses instead of strengths.