The media are often accused of acting as the judge and jury in high-profile trials, so maybe Judge Larry Paul Fidler decided to skip the speculation and just let a Dateline NBC producer sit on the jury in Phil Spector's murder trial, which starts today.

L.A.-based independent reporter Eric Longabardi reported on ERSNews.com Tuesday that Adam Gorfain, a 41-year-old senior producer who runs Dateline's Los Angeles office, will help decide Spector's fate. Longabardi suggests that Gorfain's role as a journalist involved in covering Spector's case prior to the trial could make him less than impartial. "According to Gorfain's own admission, he's been working on the Spector case for months," Longabardi writes. "In his juror questionnaire released by the court last Friday, the Dateline producer wrote that 'for several months, I have been assigned to this case for NBC News as a senior producer.'"

But an NBC News insider downplays Gorfain's role in the network's Spector coverage. "He's only been covering it in the sense that he runs the L.A. office" and decides who's on what story, the insider says. "He hasn't done a second of reporting on Spector or reviewed a script." Dateline has only done one Spector story so far, the source says, and Gorfain had nothing to do with it. He had been slated internally as the senior producer on a Spector story that hasn't happened yet, the source says, "but of course now he obviously isn't."

Still, at a time when jurors are regularly booted from high-profile trials just for watching too much television coverage about a case, it's a little odd that someone who actually produces that coverage made the cut. "We were all astonished," says the NBC Newser, adding that Gorfain was heard a few weeks ago joking about the possibility that he might land on the Spector jury. "We were like, 'Yeah, right,'" the source says.

An NBC spokeswoman declined to comment.