VOICES
TV and the Supreme Court
Broadcasters want access, but will they deliver serious coverage?
As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor writes in her memoir, The Majesty of the Law, the U.S. Supreme Court "is not a bad place from which to get some sense of the nation's concerns . . . ." TV people have tried for years to get their eyes and ears into that national court. While all fifty states permit electronic media in courtrooms, federal courts have experimented with cameras, but currently hardly any allow them. The Supreme Court issues transcripts (without justices' names), and releases audiotapes at the end of the judicial term. But it has never let cameras or microphones into proceedings.
Some justices cite privacy concerns. Others worry that cameras would inhibit the rigorous debate that characterizes oral arguments. Some disapprove of cameras in any courtroom for fear they may trivialize the lofty atmosphere of their own. Chief Justice William Rehnquist told a 1992 judicial conference that cameras "would lessen to a certain extent some of the mystique and moral authority" of the Supreme Court.
Legal scholars are more pointed, noting that the Court's very power depends on the public's perception of it as an autonomous, apolitical unit. "If the public comes to see the justices as simply a collection of individuals with particular views about various issues, they will lose some of their capacity to speak as an institution," Michael Dorf, a Columbia University law professor, told the AP. "The justices are probably the most powerful anonymous people in the United States, and having their faces on television would undermine that."
In April the broadcast media received a hopeful nod. For only the second time in history, the Court released same-day audiotapes of oral arguments, in the University of Michigan affirmative-action cases. (The first was in Bush v. Gore, which decided the Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election.)
Given this rare access, how did the broadcast media respond? Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, they did a typical drive-by.
C-Span played the full two hours of arguments. NPR aired a half-hour special. All Things Considered and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer ran meaty excerpts, as did the Catherine Crier show on Court TV. But other viewers got one- or two-sentence morsels of audiotape as correspondents skillfully trimmed stories to fit small newsholes. The audiotapes resulted in neither richer coverage of the Court process nor heightened examination of individual justices.
Let's take a broader look. Overall, coverage of the Supreme Court is declining. Studies culled from journalism journals show 30 percent fewer newsmagazine stories in the 1980s than in the 1970s; half as many broadcast stories in 1994 as in 1989; and a drop from thirteen to nine full-time Court reporters from 2001 to 2002. The pressroom is getting noticeably quieter.
"The only network that still really covers the Court is NBC with Pete Williams," says Linda Greenhouse, who has covered the Court for The New York Times since 1978.
Williams started in 1993 and worked alongside such veteran beat reporters as ABC's Tim O'Brien and CBS's Rita Braver. These days, off-air producers keep an eye on the Court for those two networks; legal affairs correspondents step in to do stand-ups on significant proceedings. CBS's producer, Deirdre Hester, says she's at the Court every day during the judicial term, but concedes that the volume of her research isn't reflected in what gets on the air. Legal issues are often considered too complex or arcane to grab a mass audience, she says. That justices avoid cameras at unofficial engagements doesn't help.
"The public visibility of the Court has dropped quite precipitously in the last generation," says Lyle Denniston, who has covered the Court for The Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and The Boston Globe since 1958. In 1996 a Radio-Television News Directors Foundation study found that only 4 percent of people who got their news from television could name the chief justice; 25 percent could name the Unabomber.
Do we want powerful people in a democracy to effectively remain anonymous? In this term alone, four of the Court's major cases were decided by the vote of just one justice - affecting voting rights, imprisonment, deportation, and affirmative action.
Television newspeople hail the benefits that broadcasts from the Court could provide to the public. The question is: Are they ready to commit the money and resources to do the kind of job the beat deserves?
The arguments for cameras in the Supreme Court are good ones:
public education, judicial scrutiny. They would be better if media
executives believed them themselves.
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