ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
One of America's best-known trial reporters, Linda Deutsch, died this past Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 80 years old.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Deutsch worked at The Associated Press for decades. She covered many of the nation's most sensational trials, including Charles Manson, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson. In 2007, Deutsch told NPR she saw trials as a reflection of history.
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LINDA DEUTSCH: If you wanted to know what was going on in America at a specific time, you needed to walk into a courtroom and look around and listen to what was happening. And you would see, for instance, in the Ellsberg trial, you saw the Vietnam War. In the Angela Davis trial, you saw the story of the Black Panthers. In the Patty Hearst trial, we had post-Vietnam alienation.
SHAPIRO: Deutsch grew up in New Jersey. She moved to Los Angeles in the '60s to become an entertainment journalist. But the 1969 trial of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, Sirhan Sirhan, changed the trajectory of her life.
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DEUTSCH: After the Sirhan trial in which I was of a backup reporter, the following year, the next thing that happened was the killing of Sharon Tate and her friends. And I covered the entire Manson trial. It's amazing how your life changes. It's all timing.
KELLY: It did not take Deutsch long to master the art of covering trials.
KATHLEEN CARROLL: Well, Linda was a consummate professional and probably set the standard for court reporting, trial reporting in the United States.
KELLY: That's Kathleen Carroll. She met Deutsch in the early '80s, when she was the day editor for the Los Angeles bureau of the AP.
CARROLL: I think it's important to remember that during most of her career, there were no cameras in courtrooms. And the public depended on journalists to describe what was going on every day.
SHAPIRO: Deutsch came prepared to her stories, says Carroll. She was kind of a translator for the country.
CARROLL: So that the readers would understand what happened and why it was important in the process that was underway.
KELLY: Deutsch didn't always find the job easy. The Rodney King trial, 1992, where police who were videotaped beating King were acquitted, it shook her faith in the justice system.
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DEUTSCH: I always believed that no matter how bad a situation was, you could go into a courtroom, and you could settle things in a civilized way. In this case, the trial triggered the worst riots in Los Angeles history.
KELLY: But even on the toughest days, Deutsch says the courtroom was still where she wanted to be.
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DEUTSCH: It's like being in a theater every day. It's like being in the front row seat to history.
SHAPIRO: No other beat, said Linda Deutsch, offered that kind of access to human emotion. She died over the weekend at the age of 80. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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