Judges and journalists often view each other warily. But on Tuesday, at the University of Arizona’s Rogers College of Law in Tucson, they found a fair amount of common ground. It may be the camaraderie of the bunker, but there was consensus on two main points: traditional news coverage of the courts is declining rapidly as print and broadcast media retrench and retool; and blogs, twitters and whatever new media are looming around the corner, hold as much promise as danger in picking up the slack. One underlying premise was also refreshing; judges realize that the old maxim, “No news is good news” is no longer operative when it comes to the courts.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer set the tone at the beginning of the day by stating that the judiciary has “a very big stake in seeing that people get proper information” about the courts. Without that information — and the understanding and support that hopefully result — “it won’t work,” Breyer said. At the end of the day, U.S. District Court Judge D. Brock Hornby of the District of Maine lamented the decline of the “watchdog function” that the media play in covering courts. “Our courtrooms are empty,” Hornby said. “We need the presence of someone like a journalist.” From the journalism side, Gene Policinski, a former USA Today editor who is vice president and executive director of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, charted the demise of the court beat at most newspapers. Journalists and judges, he said, “need each other.”
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