Two weeks ago, cameras finally made it into the Supreme Court. It was not the way we would have liked to see that barrier broken, but it has been. The camera was snuck into oral arguments by a protester, who took some grainy footage and made the point that it didn’t make sense C-SPAN was still not allowed in.
As contributing editor George Winslow’s story on wearable news gathering equipment makes clear, tech is outpacing the court’s last-century views on the intrusiveness of cameras. If they don’t even know the camera is there, it can hardly be intrusive, as was the case with last week’s shaky visuals.
C-SPAN has proved that professionals with a commitment to excellence can provide unobtrusive, enlightening access to the sausage-making on Capitol Hill. The net has a standing invitation to the Supreme Court to do the same thing for what are supposed to be public proceedings. The court should take them up on the offer before citizen journalists, or the Google Glass set, corner the market on out-of-focus excerpts.
