Friday, October 22, 2010
Why The Times Is Wrong
The New York Times has an editorial--one of many editorials--urging the Supreme Court to allow televisions to broadcast live from the Court. This is a popular position, and one the Congress has been pushing for years. Leading the charge has been Senator Arlen Specter (D. PA), who has made this a key issue for years, asking potential Supreme Court nominees if they would support bringing television to the Supreme Court. Currently. Specter has a resolution (S.Res.339) expressing the "sense of the Senate in support of permitting the televising of Supreme Court proceedings." And the Times editorial says that "Senator Specter was right when he argued that the rights of all American would be 'substantially enhanced' if we could watch the court...."
To bolster the point about opening the Court, the Times editorial writes: "Many state appellate courts have been televising oral arguments for years. The new Supreme Court of the UK does so, to high praise in Britain." These are false equivalencies. First, the media system in the UK is not the media system in the US. The extensive public broadcasting system in UK and Europe consistently presents politics in a different way than the commercial system in the US--here in the US, politics is pitched as a game or battle between "players", in a frame that has been known to increase public cynicism. The way in which our media covers Congress and the Presidency has led, in part, to the decline in trust in those two institutions. As for the state appellate courts, they are not the Supreme Court. They are not likely to attract the attention that the Supreme Court will. Furthermore, the evidence on television coverage of state courts shows that it does nothing to enhance public understanding of what the courts do--the coverage trends to the coverage of other issues--void of context and focused on those cases that are most violent or unusual. And what gets covered is the opening arguments and closing arguments. The Times doesn't mention that.
So there is the argument in the abstract that you should have more transparency in the representative institutions to make sure democracy functions like it should. But in reality, television coverage of our representative institutions has actually hurt democracy. The Supreme Court knows this. The Times should as well.
To bolster the point about opening the Court, the Times editorial writes: "Many state appellate courts have been televising oral arguments for years. The new Supreme Court of the UK does so, to high praise in Britain." These are false equivalencies. First, the media system in the UK is not the media system in the US. The extensive public broadcasting system in UK and Europe consistently presents politics in a different way than the commercial system in the US--here in the US, politics is pitched as a game or battle between "players", in a frame that has been known to increase public cynicism. The way in which our media covers Congress and the Presidency has led, in part, to the decline in trust in those two institutions. As for the state appellate courts, they are not the Supreme Court. They are not likely to attract the attention that the Supreme Court will. Furthermore, the evidence on television coverage of state courts shows that it does nothing to enhance public understanding of what the courts do--the coverage trends to the coverage of other issues--void of context and focused on those cases that are most violent or unusual. And what gets covered is the opening arguments and closing arguments. The Times doesn't mention that.
So there is the argument in the abstract that you should have more transparency in the representative institutions to make sure democracy functions like it should. But in reality, television coverage of our representative institutions has actually hurt democracy. The Supreme Court knows this. The Times should as well.
