SCOTUS, streaming: Roberts mum on media requests to broadcast opinions

WASHINGTON (CN) — A coalition of reporters covering the U.S. Supreme Court last summer urged Chief Justice John Roberts to consider allowing live audio broadcasts of the high court’s opinion announcements — but, one year later, the court’s top jurist has yet to reply.

The group of more than two dozen journalists, which includes Courthouse News’ Supreme Court correspondent Kelsey Reichmann, made their June 7, 2024, letter to the chief justice public Wednesday morning. They argue that streaming the court’s decisions would give the justices the unique opportunity to speak directly to Americans and make the Supreme Court more accessible to the average person.

The high court has traditionally done its work out of the broader public eye. Until 2020, oral arguments before the justices and opinion announcements took place within the Supreme Court’s four walls, meaning that journalists, lawyers and others who could be physically present for such events were the only ones able to experience them in real time.

But things changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the court began broadcasting live audio of oral arguments. That move, members of the media told Roberts last year, had a “transformative effect” on the way Americans engage with the justices.

“Oral arguments are now more accessible than ever to the general public, for whom as few as 50 seats in the courtroom are normally reserved,” they wrote. “With four years of experience livestreaming arguments, it appears safe to say that none of the concerns often expressed to justify opposition to live audio have come to pass.”

With the court’s oral argument experiment in the books, the group of journalists argued that Roberts should turn his attention to broadcasting opinion announcements.

As it stands, opinion announcements are recorded, but the audio is sent to the National Archives and not made public until the beginning of the Supreme Court’s next term. This means that there’s a significant delay between an opinion hand-down and publication of audio from the announcement — opinion audio from cases decided this term will not be made public until October.

Opponents of the proposal have said that a live reading of a summary penned by the primary author of a Supreme Court opinion may not reflect the views of the other justices who signed onto the majority opinion. But the media coalition contended that such concerns were unwarranted — opinion announcements are already made in public to those in the courtroom, it said, and audio recordings of the announcements are eventually provided to the National Archives and published.

“[T]hey are simply not available to the broader public,” the reporters told Roberts.

The Supreme Court press representatives also acknowledged that the justices believe that their opinions, rather than announcements of their opinions, should “speak for themselves.”

“Ideally, they should,” they wrote. “But many of the issues before the court are complicated and may result in opinions that are dozens, if not hundreds, of pages long. The vast majority of Americans are unlikely to read a court opinion in its entirety.”

And particularly in an “era of misinformation,” the journalists added, broadcasting live audio of the high court’s opinion announcements would allow the justices to connect directly with the American people “on issues of extraordinary importance.”

The Supreme Court correspondents requested a meeting with Roberts to discuss the possibility of streaming opinion announcements. But in the year since they first sent their letter to the chief justice, he has not replied.

In December, the coalition tried again, circling back on its initial request and asking that the letter be circulated among the other eight justices, if it hadn’t been already. That correspondence also went unanswered.

The high court has long been reticent to increase the availability of opinion announcements, expressing concern that, among other things, the announcement of one justice’s opinion does not receive approval from other jurists on the bench.

But proponents of the practice have said that there is little case not to provide live audio of opinion announcements, especially after the Supreme Court moved to broadcast oral arguments.

Gabe Roth, director of reform-minded judicial advocacy group Fix the Court, told Courthouse News on Wednesday that providing live audio of such announcements was a “simple and obvious move” that could help demystify the inner workings of the Supreme Court at a time when Americans are paying close attention to it.

Roth agreed that most people do not read opinions in their entirety, especially since some are dozens of pages long — and added that live audio would allow the justices to tell the world about their decisions in real time rather than “have it filtered through myriad reporters across various outlets.”

And though he acknowledged that the justices have long said that it’s the written word of their opinions, not what’s said during opinion announcements, represents the formal holding of a case. “But — and this should be obvious — the justices during a livestreamed announcement would have every opportunity to articulate that truism,” Roth explained.

In a June 2024 issue of his newsletter One First, Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck contended that the justices’ worries — that they couldn’t control live audio, that their comments would be taken out of context and that they might be recorded making comments outside of a case’s scope — had already been addressed when the court allowed oral arguments to be livestreamed.

“Given how the argument livestreaming evolution took place, it certainly seems likely that, at some point, the court made an affirmative decision to not livestream hand-downs,” Vladeck wrote. “Any such decision, in my view, was and remains an unfortunate one.”

Follow @BenjaminSWeiss