Imagine a saucy new reality television show featuring nine people forced to work together making major decisions about hot-button issues of our country. Well, maybe that's a stretch, but if a few select members of the U.S. Senate get what they want, we may soon have new means of satisfying our fix for reality melodrama in the form of telecasted U.S. Supreme Court proceedings.
Last week, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., introduced a bill legalizing television cameras to record Supreme Court proceedings unless a majority of the justices decide in a particular case it would violate the right to a fair trial. Specter publicly noted numerous reasons for supporting such legislation.
Specter claims the public has the right to know exactly what is going on in the Supreme Court and having the proceedings televised would inform our citizens exactly how it functions. Additionally, he stated many of the justices have already appeared on high- profile interviews, so the objection that justices would be tempted to play to an audience is not a potential problem.
However, the central problem is not only are Specter's arguments invalid, but more importantly, if the bill passed it would not accomplish its supposed objectives. More likely it would become a tool of misinformation to the public and hamper democracy in more ways than one.
Specter's tentative claim about the results of passing the bill rests on unsound foundations. For instance, the public already has ample educational access to the precise happenings in the Supreme Court, as it releases transcripts and audiotapes of oral arguments on the day they occur. Furthermore, having the proceedings telecast will not necessarily lead to a more knowledgeable public, and in fact may have the opposite effect.
Still, increasing media exposure in the form of television cameras would not serve to better inform the public. Because the news media is a business where a riveting, yet exaggerated story brings in the most viewers, completely honest and mundane reports would not be very welcome.
Therefore, the stations would probably take sound bytes out of context to lure in viewers and further sensationalize already highly volatile issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Topics such as these need no dramatization, as they are already used by politicians as electric cattle prods, whipping up constituents into an emotionally driven, irrational frenzy during election times.
We have already seen how the media can hamper justice by making itself a prominent figure in high-profile cases. Take the O.J. Simpson trial, for example. The courtroom vanished and was replaced by a brightly lit stage as Judge Ito, Marcia Clark and everyone's favorite, Johnny Cochrane, played to the masses. The television media proved to be a potent catalyst in politicizing the case, and this aspect, not necessarily the verdict itself, undermined justice.
Hence, having cameras in the Supreme Court would inherently violate the defendant's right to a fair trial by manipulating public perception in a similar fashion, stirring up commotion for the sake of drama in the process.
By undercutting the Supreme Court's legitimacy, it seems this may be an attempt by a few members of the Senate to inadvertently chip away at the democratic cornerstone of checks and balances.
Ultimately, the consequences would be mainly destructive by impugning our nation's highest court, weakening our governmental mechanism for balance of power and further dividing an already polarized public. In order to make levelheaded decisions, the justices need to be left in peace, and the cameras need to be left at the door.
