Should SCOTUS cases be livestreamed or shown on TV?

[brucejoel99]

I'd love to see the COVID-era live audio feed made permanent because oral arguments should be broadcast live in some form, but cameras in the courtroom would honestly suck. Not only are oral arguments >99% audio & mayyyybe 1% visual on a good day (e.g., back in the days of yore when Scalia was still around for a good quip every now & then) anyway, but the chief drawbacks of live or even just same-day televised proceedings that come to mind are that they could potentially change the way in which the justices act in the courtroom (given that they'd now have cameras on them), & not necessarily for the better; reduce the relative level of anonymity that the justices now hold as individuals, thereby potentially heightening their security concerns as a result; & result in flashy 30-second snippets & soundbites being plucked from the proceedings for cable news, thereby leading to the public misinterpreting the Court &/or its processes. At least the general lack of flashiness or "sexiness" - for lack of a better term - associated with just the use of sound has mostly prevented the cable news networks from plucking any flashy 30-second soundbites from the audio recordings for use, but I don't even wanna risk seeing what they'd do if given the opportunity to do so. If they had to "televise" cases purely for the purpose of people being able to watch what an argument looks like, then they could just utilize the live audio feed like they've been doing since the onset of COVID while perhaps recording a visual feed but not releasing the video recordings 'til a certain point in the future, be it the conclusion of either that Court's monthly sitting or its OT, the point in time at which none of the justices serving at the time-of-recording are no longer serving on the Court &/or alive, etc. That way, you don't suffer from the potential drawbacks of live video, all the while not suffering any of the lack thereof's potential "historical-purpose" harms. But anybody who wants to know what happened at oral arguments can already listen to the audio thereof in the status quo, while visual proceedings would perhaps constitute just a minor improvement over the status quo's format, all the while risking the aforementioned dangers, many of which are the same dangers that such various justices as Scalia, Breyer, Alito, & Kagan have all cautioned Congress about at committee hearing after committee hearing on the proposal.

[brucejoel99]

Absolutely not. We shouldn't have cameras in Congress either.

Strongly agree about no cameras in court, but not sure about Congress. Why?

Not who you were responding to, but the establishment of C-SPAN & the resultant ability of news networks to pluck any flashy congressional snippets thereof undoubtedly played a significant role in turning Congress into the dysfunctional - let alone do-nothing - hall of sh*t that it is today, in that Congress devolved from actually being about inquiring into given matters at hand into a polarized hellhole in response to every congressional proceeding becoming the news' clip-bait. In the post C-SPAN era, a member of Congress is just campaigning rather than legislating whenever they happen to find themselves in front of a camera. Of course, the alternative to that was who-the-hell-knows because greater congressional transparency is indeed obviously important for representative accountability purposes, but still, with cameras having already f**ked that branch of government up, it's not unreasonable to not want to see them forcibly inflicted upon another.

[brucejoel99]

Relevant (& good!) update:

https://twitter.com/steve_vladeck/status/1575217734023254018