PRESS, PUBLIC COURT ACCESS: CAN'T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER.

Until recently, I thought of Freedom of the Press as a First Amendment right reserved to, well, the press.

          I included the press right of access to criminal trials in that category.  That's how I used to see a constitutional ruling by the Supreme Court protecting the Freedom of the Press to access criminal trials, for example.  I saw it as press freedom that is uniquely protected by the U.S. Constitution because, well, the press has to be free in order to have a chance to report regardless of whether things are good, or whether things are bad.

          Now I have had my eyes opened a little.  The Supreme Court may have been getting at this when they ruled a couple of decades ago that Freedom of the Press involves access to criminal trials:  Simply put, it may be that the First Amendment protects Freedom of the Press so that the press can help to protect the First Amendment presumption of public access to court proceedings (and to court files, too, for that matter).

          Emily Palmer is a reporter who reports on court proceedings.  Due to COVID-19, she can only rarely attend live court proceedings; at this time and for awhile before now, she has had to attend them via Zoom or its equivalent.  She reports that some information in the trials is lost in translation.

          She writes that she spends hours covering the trial alongside colleagues who help each other decipher what's happening on-screen "in a trial in which some evidence is never released to the public."  Even when things are not intentionally hidden, she writes, witnesses mumble and "read brusquely" from documents, "and most of the evidence from trial is rarely shared later with the public, making it both more difficult and more important for us to create a record of the proceedings in real time."  Emily Parker, Courtroom Reporting When You're Not Quite in Court, NEW YORK TIMES online Thursday, September 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/insider/court-reporting-pandemic-covid.html?searchResultPosition=1.

          Here's the rest of the story, as the saying goes:  Without press freedom, there may not actually be public access to court proceedings.  That is almost certainly why both things are protected by the First Amendment:  Freedom of the Press including the right to attend criminal trials, and the presumption that the public has the right to access court proceedings too.

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