Journalists receive no justice from Scalia

In his University of Montana lecture Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia was very animated, gesticulating wildly and scrunching his cherubic face to match his varying tones.
But you wouldn’t have seen that unless you were there.
He was charming, often speaking from the cuff and telling jokes.
But you wouldn’t have heard that unless you were there. 

That’s because Scalia, who argues that the Constitution should be interpreted just as its framers intended it, demands that video and audio recording devices be prohibited from his speeches. He wants them to be treated as Supreme Court proceedings.
However, for Scalia to ban an arm of the press goes against the very ideals he claims to embody in the Supreme Court. The First Amendment quite famously states, “Congress shall make no law respecting … the freedom of speech, or the press.” Not even the stodgiest of powder-haired framers would have been so contradictory as to say some members of the press should be kept out of public forums.
It’s standard practice for Scalia. No cameras were allowed at a Sept. 15 appearance at Utah State University. There, student media took cameras anyhow, but were promptly kicked out. Scalia spoke at Utah State as part of a conference titled “Freedom and the Rule of Law,” no less.
In a word: preposterous.
It is simply unconstitutional to hold a free and open public forum and to forcefully exclude one element of the press. Scalia, if truly the strict originalist he purports himself to be, should recognize that and embrace press freedoms more than anyone.
At UM on Wednesday, Scalia said the role of the Bill of Rights is to “anchor, to make permanent the views on a number of things,” including, he said, freedom of speech. However, he is apparently exempt from his own watchful eye of Constitutional misconduct.
Scalia has no reservations about flouting what may be the most static part of the entire Constitution in the interest of personal preference.
Ah, the perks of power.
Well, the Missoula press corps fired back, and rightfully so.
Ian Marquand, a KPAX-TV reporter and president of the Montana chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists, shot off an e-mail this week to local media. In it he proposed a boycott of the lecture, a suggestion with which at least two local media outlets, KPAX and KGVO radio, agreed.
“We felt they were conditions we weren’t going to comply with,” KPAX news director Dennis Bragg said.
Thus, Wednesday’s nightly news on KPAX offered no mention of a Supreme Court justice so much as appearing in Missoula, let alone giving an entertaining and compelling lecture on the University campus.
However, the buck doesn’t stop with Scalia. The University of Montana should be held accountable for allowing such restrictions to be placed on the press. While it is a distinct honor to have visitors as esteemed as Supreme Court justices come to UM — Scalia was the fifth justice to speak as part of the same lecture series — it’s irresponsible to bend over backward accommodating them.
The School of Law has a responsibility to represent what is right with the law to the future lawyers and judges of this country. That it was seemingly willing to rubberstamp the notion that the First Amendment is optional, only to be employed when convenient, is extremely disappointing.
So while Scalia was charming and loquacious — quite the contrast to the gruff and hardened portrayal he typically receives — Montanans didn’t get to see that on their TVs. In fact, it’s almost like he was never here.
And perhaps, given the message sent by barring broadcast journalists, he never should have been.
— Bill Oram, editor, william.oram@umontana.edu