Ruminating on television

To be honest, I don’t know how I really feel about television broadcasts of trials. On the one hand, CNN’s argument in favor of television broadcasting makes some sort of intellectual sense, and I was especially struck by the line (I forget where exactly it is) that judges’ interest in preserving their self-image should most certainly not be one of the main reasons for prohibiting television.

On the other hand, if one adopts an originalist perspective of what the Founders had in mind, it comes across as somewhat different. If one had a vested interest in a trial, wanted to observe good government, check for corruption or any number of the reasons cited, while one would have had open access to the trial, it required some sort of action. In other words, it is not as if trials were passively beamed into the households; one had to actively seek it out.

Passively beaming trials, of course, is exactly what television broadcasting is. And as much as I usually disagree with Scalia on political issues, I sort of find myself in agreement with him in that I think that the televising of trials does not fundamentally address any of the principles that support public access to trials. Watching a sound bite of a trial for 10 seconds does not aid a citizen in deciding whether justice is being meted out in any particular situation.

However, this line of reasoning is problematic in that if we took it to its logical extension, then essentially we wouldn’t ever be able to adapt any modern technologies to old problems. At this point, what I’m reminded of is the situation in which a trial was moved more than 350 miles away, and thus crime victims were able to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television. Would this perhaps be a solution? Allow televising in trials, but either require that citizens go somewhere (say, public libraries) to watch them, which would set up some sort of barrier (which seems to be what I want to do in the first place), or perhaps prohibit news stations from only showing short clips, i.e. if a trial is televised, it must be televised in full or at least not in 15-second increments?

This all strikes me as rather Orwellian, of course, and I have the strong feeling that there are any number of constitutional problems with this type of haphazard solution that I’ve concocted to this issue. But fundamentally, I find that this is one of the situations in which I actually sort of agree with the more conservative interpretations of statutes, and say that perhaps modern technology should not be included in this problem.