Courtroom TV may favour drama over law

The televising of court proceedings may carry more risks than appear on first sight, writes John Horgan

The televising of court proceedings may carry more risks than appear on first sight, writes John Horgan

The British Lord Chancellor has recently authorised a pilot scheme to see whether the television broadcast of court proceedings might be acceptable in the future. This pilot scheme does not involve any actual broadcasts.

What will happen is that selected hearings in the senior courts of appeal (i.e. courts sitting without juries) will be filmed, and treated in television news bulletin formats, which will then be viewed in private by cabinet ministers.

If Britain moves, will Ireland be far behind? Certainly the British experiment will prompt calls for a similar initiative on this side of the Irish Sea. Journalists may be expected to be all in favour of it. Some judges, even, may relish the opportunity to have their considered verdicts, or at least significant chunks of their judgments, transmitted directly to an interested public, possibly as part of a dedicated channel which could also give extensive coverage to democratic institutions without being too much in thrall to the ratings battle. The barristers, like the judges, would probably be divided.

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On the face of it, the argument looks simple enough. Newspaper reporters have been allowed into the courts for ages, so what is wrong with allowing the TV cameras in as well? Radio, it might be accepted, is more problematic, if only because of the difficulty of identifying who is speaking at any given time.

But is it as simple as that? For one thing, the right of the print media, even as things stand, is not unfettered. The entire proceedings in some cases, and details of others, simply cannot be published in any media for a variety of reasons, and this does not evoke the cry of censorship. There is also the problem of patchy standards in court reporting, outlined recently by Mr Justice Hardiman.

Even newspapers, which generally have considerably more space for factual reporting at their disposal than either radio or television, sometimes have difficulty in finding room for all the nuances of a complex series of findings.

And television is fundamentally a tabloid, rather than a broadsheet, medium. Although many people turn to it as a source of news, it is also a primary source of entertainment; and there are times when the demarcation lines are not as clearly defined as they might be.

Indeed, television news broadcasting in recent years has shown a distinct shift away from the old, hierarchical agenda it inherited from the print media, and towards a more organic format driven by programming values and the need to maximise audiences. To introduce a new element - the TV reporting of courtroom proceedings - into the already frenetic competition for audiences between and within media is tempting fate, to put it mildly.

The argument about televising legal proceedings, it seems to me, slips a gear. The assumption is that because justice, generally speaking, has to be carried out in public (the Constitution says so), it should also be available on the airwaves. But televising courtroom proceedings will not make them any more public than they already are: anybody can walk into a courtroom, after all. It will simply enlarge the access that is already there.

But what people will see and hear on television is not what people will see and hear in the courtroom, and will be even less detailed than what appears in print. On television, they will see dramatic snippets, tragic snippets, funny snippets. These may be wholly unrepresentative of the proceedings, but this will not strip them of protection.

People who are present in court will, if they stay long enough, hear the entire proceedings and the verdict. The media - both print and electronic - are not required to publish the verdict in any proceedings they may have reported earlier, although in practice they generally do. It is often difficult enough for people who have sat through the entire proceedings to understand fully what has been going on, and why certain decisions were taken: what chance has the television viewer? To argue in favour of allowing TV cameras into courtrooms on the grounds that it will enhance public education is naïve at best, hypocritical at worst.

Sometimes a society simply has to choose between conflicting sets of values. The contempt of court legislation, although it is patchy and probably in need of reform, is based on the central consideration that what happens in a court is, or should be, free-standing, sacrosanct, immune from malign external influences.

The freedom of the media is an equally important value, as is the constitutional imperative that justice should be administered in public.

But because justice has to be administered in public it does not logically follow that it should also be administered on television; and the experience of the United States, in particular, suggests strongly that there is an ever-present danger that the televising of courtrooms will, at the end of the day, become another sub-branch of the entertainment industry. I certainly doubt that this is what the drafters of our Constitution had in mind.

John Horgan is professor of journalism at Dublin City University.