Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was in Mississippi yesterday, speaking to students about the Constitution as a “brilliant piece of work.”
“The Constitution of the United States is extraordinary and amazing,” Scalia said. “People just don’t revere it like they used to.”
Ironically, around the time Scalia was praising a document that protects the freedom of the press, a federal marshal approached two reporters on hand to cover Scalia’s speech and explained that their tape recorders had to be erased.
Scalia has consistently maintained a policy of not allowing media to photograph or record his public appearances. Before speaking at a Mississippi high school yesterday, however, the justice did not warn the audience that recording devices would be forbidden.
During the speech, a woman identifying herself as a deputy federal marshal demanded that a reporter for Associated Press erase a tape recording of the justice’s comments. She said the justice had asked that his appearance not be recorded.
The reporter initially resisted, but later showed the deputy how to erase the digital recording after the officer took the device from her hands. The exchange occurred in the front row of the auditorium while Scalia delivered his speech about the Constitution.
The deputy, who identified herself as Melanie Rube, also made a reporter for the Hattiesburg American erase her tape.
It’s hard to believe this can happen in America, isn’t it.
I obviously wasn’t there, so I can’t appreciate the context, but I really can’t imagine why these reporters cooperated with the marshal. Journalists don’t work for Scalia nor the government at any level. These two were covering a public official in a public setting and decided to record his remarks. This is not only perfectly legal; it’s entirely normal.
There are plenty of countries in the world that send armed government officials to confiscate journalists’ notes and recording devices — China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. These countries don’t have a free press and their citizens aren’t provided the benefits of a watchdog media.
One gets the impression that Scalia might be more comfortable in those settings than our own.
It wasn’t the only controversy with Scalia yesterday. At a college reception last night, Scalia also evicted reporters with cameras from the room, despite the fact that Scalia’s office told the college that “the media would have access to Justice Scalia during the reception.”
That Antonin must be one shy individual.
In fact, this has been a problem for Scalia for a while. Almost exactly a year ago, Scalia was in Ohio to accept a Citadel of Free Speech Award from the City Club of Cleveland. To demonstrate his commitment to the First Amendment, Scalia banned all news coverage of his appearance.
Scalia’s request — and the club’s decision to honor it — provoked outrage from several news outlets, including C-SPAN, and the Radio-Television News Directors Association, a group representing the electronic news media.
“How free is speech if there are limits to its distribution?,” C-SPAN Vice President and Executive Producer Terry Murphy wrote in a letter to the City Club’s president.
The ban on broadcast media “begs disbelief and seems to be in conflict with the award itself,” Murphy wrote.
RTNDA president Barbara Cochran also protested the City Club’s decision to block the media.
“The irony of excluding journalists from an event designed to celebrate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech is obvious to all,” Cochran wrote in a letter to Foster, released to the press Wednesday.
So when Scalia isn’t pushing the boundaries of judicial ethics, he’s cracking down on a free press. No wonder Bush has singled him out as the kind of justice he most admires.