On December 1, 1988, Hedda Nussbaum took the stand in a New York City courtroom to testify against the man the newspapers called, for want of a better term, her "lover" - Joel Steinberg, who had abused her and was now charged with murder in the death of their illegally adopted child.

A week later a story in The New York Times began: "Hedda Nussbaum, it seemed, was everywhere in New York this week. And, everywhere, people were drawn to her story." The explanation offered was the perverse ordinariness of her account - that of middle-class family life descending into drugs, violence, and squalor. Only in the twelfth paragraph did the writer mention parenthetically - so swiftly had this novelty become taken for granted - that her testimony had been presented live on local television.

The Steinberg trial was an initiation for New Yorkers into a practice that had already become commonplace in most states - television access to courtrooms, both live proceedings and taped excerpts used in other programs. The trial was broadcast during the state's eighteen-month television experiment, which resulted, after fits and starts, in legislation authorizing courtroom access under specified conditions until early in 1995 when, presumably, the whole question will be debated anew.

Paul Thaler, one of a squad of graduate students at New York University studying the effects of televised trials, looked to the Steinberg trial for answers to a question that he states as follows: "Could television be responsible for altering the attitudes, judgments, and behaviors of trial participants, creating a radically new relationship between media and the courts?" In other words, does television result in distortion of courtroom behavior distinct from other possible distortions? To this end, he interviewed forty participants in the trial, including the judge, lawyers, expert witnesses, reporters, the defendant, and, through her lawyer, Hedda Nussbaum, trying in every instance to determine whether the presence of television had changed what they did in court.

The result is The Watchful Eye, or at least the book's second half. Given the framework in which he places his study - the introduction is titled "The Faustian Bargain" - it seems probable that Thaler was seeking an indictment, perhaps even a basis for expelling television from the courtroom. But in his conclusions he is fair-minded enough to concede that his interviews offer distinctly mixed evidence.

There can be little quarrel with his assertion that television coverage ties a trial more closely to a complex environment of public and media opinion beyond the courtroom. The interviews show that the participants had television continually in mind, often in effect reviewing their own performances. For example, Hedda Nussbaum dressed differently after seeing herself on the stand and even the judge may have modified his prickly behavior.

But the perceived changes in courtroom behavior inspired by television's presence were often more subtle and even contradictory. Some of the defense lawyers, whose client's interests were supposedly endangered by television, support the broadcasts; some members of the prosecution team oppose them. Steinberg says he believes that television's presence at the trial led to his portrayal in the news media as such a monster that he would have been ostracized even if he had been acquitted. On the other hand, one of the prosecutors asserts that the jury, conscious that it was sharing the trial with millions of viewers, tried so hard to be fair that it convicted him on a lesser charge, first-degree manslaughter, than the evidence warranted.

The views expressed in these interviews are the heart of this study. Journalists will find particularly interesting the observation by reporters who were interviewed that live television made their jobs harder because it led to second-guessing by editors watching the trial back at the office and to tougher competition for off-camera aspects of the story, particularly leaks from the lawyers. Hence, much coverage of the trial wandered off into the realms of spin and speculation.

The first half of the book, a survey titled "The Age of the Television Trial," is less satisfactory than the portions dealing with the Steinberg trial because it does not keep the book's prime question in focus - that is, how television affects the behavior of trial participants.

Here everything is grist for Thaler's mill - not only trials televised over the last thirty-odd years but also such spinoffs as staged retrials, hypothetical trials (Lee Harvey Oswald), docudramas inspired by trials, and even Judge Wapner's small-claims court. Thaler dips as well into the historical panorama of the American trial as public furor, and to the extent that he acknowledges that trials subject to ferocious public prejudices took place long before the arrival of television, he undermines his case for the peculiarly baleful influence of television.

Indeed, the pretelevision popular press used misdeeds and mishaps of otherwise uncelebrated people as a vehicle almost from the day it defined private misery as a source of news. Who - before they were elevated to courtroom fame - were Chester Gillette, ultimately transmogrified into the principal figure of Dreiser's An American Tragedy? Or Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder, the murderous but banal adulterers of the late twenties? Or Dr. Sam Sheppard, whose murder conviction was thrown out because of the misbehavior of the Cleveland newspapers? Even Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum attained celebrity status well before television came into their courtroom.

What can television possibly add to such a record? As Thaler suggests, it is the most seductive popular medium to date; in taking over the functions of the old tabloid press, it provides more to the audience while demanding less. But this does not mean that television is the creator of what Thaler calls "mediated feedback." The pressures of mass - some would say mob - opinion have always filtered back into the courtroom, creating the threat of prejudicial publicity - that is, publicity preceding and foreclosing an unbiased verdict. Television may have made these pressures more intense, but the problem is hardly new or peculiar to the television age, and the courts have built robust defenses against such interference, starting with the rules for control of the courtroom laid down by the Supreme Court nearly thirty years ago in overturning Dr. Sheppard's conviction.

Thaler notes the arrival of Court TV, the cable channel devoted entirely to legal proceedings, and suggests that the creation of its national audience might in effect create a lynch mob of millions. Indeed, there is an underlying distrust throughout this study - and perhaps in the whole school of TV criticism spawned at NYU - of public good sense, a hint that the audience can be depended on to react in the worst way and that justice would be best served if the courtroom could be hermetically sealed. He could be right, if one were to judge solely by the rancid stuff that the public consumes in the current television environment of tabloid programs, talk shows, and bloody local news.

But his chief exhibit - the Steinberg trial - stands in his way. There is little evidence here that the presence of cameras at the trial created a lynch-mob atmosphere; to the extent that there was such an atmosphere it was set in place before the trial by journalism in general, not by the camera in the courtroom. Most certainly, it was not created by the extended live broadcast of Nussbaum's testimony, an aspect of the coverage that Steinberg himself concedes was balanced.

Thaler brushes off the purported educational effects of trial coverage as nonexistent, basing his conclusion on an NYU dissertation concluding that public understanding of the judicial process had not improved during the eighteen-month courtroom-television experiment. But certainly what can be learned from watching a trial - and in extended portions, not snippets - is not confined to technicalities. Anybody who has served on juries knows that process becomes rote, that the learning is in the appraisal of human beings.

Studying Hedda Nussbaum, the watching public may have been more sorrowful than angry, more dismayed than vengeful. Through her they could glimpse the abyss, learn what it was like to slip over the edge.

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