Sky News to Launch Campaign to Lift Ban on Cameras in Courts

Sky News has announced that it will launch a campaign, after the General Election, to lift the ban on cameras in courts.

In a speech to the Cambridge Union Society on television and democracy, Head of Sky News, John Ryley, said, “Sky News will be campaigning hard to lift the ban on cameras in courts.  We will explore every opportunity to mount a legal challenge against the ban on cameras, launch a public petition, as we did for the Leaders’ Debates, and remind our viewers, listeners and website users about the campaign every time we report from outside a court with no pictures of what has taken place inside.   

“It’s precisely what you’d expect from a truly independent news organisation able to push boundaries and challenge the status quo.

“I will be asking the BBC if it wants to join our campaign  – I look forward to the answer.” 

The announcement follows on from Sky News’ successful TV, web and newspaper campaign for Leaders’ Debates at the forthcoming General Election.

The unilateral campaign led to more than 15,000 people signing its online petition, all three party leaders committing `in principle’ to participate in them and resulted in the current cross-broadcaster collaboration to find ways to make this work. 

In his speech, John Ryley said, “There remains one more branch of our democratic system which broadcasting has still not properly penetrated.  The courts.

“If the legislature is to be subject to far greater scrutiny, so too must the judiciary, so the public can fairly judge the balance of responsibility between them.

“A coherent, and fair, judicial system is the keystone of a democratic system.  Today, any member of the public has the right to walk into any court, any day, and see justice being done, but few have the time or the means to do so.  There can be no logic for excluding the cameras from events which are already held in public.  Nor, may I say, any public interest: the decline in public confidence in politics is perhaps only matched by the decline in confidence in the judiciary. 

“The public wants to understand how a householder can be imprisoned for defending his family and his property.  They want to know how a man can avoid jail for viewing child abuse on the Internet.  They will certainly want to know if the CPS decides to prosecute a Parliamentarian over his expenses. 

“Far from being the downfall of the judicial system, I believe exposure to public scrutiny could be its saviour, enabling the public to understand the constraints under which our judges operate - the complexities of many of the cases before them which are inevitably over-simplified in a 30 second news piece.”

John Ryley outlined in his speech the innovative days that Sky News had devised, over the years, to circumvent the ban on broadcasting within the courts: 

• Winning permission to run live transcripts of proceedings, produced by stenographers
• Mounting nightly reconstructions with actors of the Hutton Inquiry into the death of the scientist Dr David Kelly
• Using 3D digital graphics to reconstruct the Soham trial of Ian Huntley and his girlfriend Maxine Carr
• Using actors, in America, once again to reconstruct the Michael Jackson trial
 
The ban on cameras in court remains, but John Ryley said he believed that the fact that the new Supreme Court has installed cameras and that the Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War is being televised were “signs that resistance is weakening”.

“The broadcasters, collectively, have been lobbying for cameras in court, probably for as long as they have lobbied for election debates.  But so far it has been fruitless.  It’s time for a new initiative,” he said.

In his speech, John Ryley said he believed television should be great tool of democracy, providing a direct line to political leadership, but argued that, until relatively recently, its “potent power” had been undermined by the establishment.

He further argued that it was the intervention of BSkyB, through Sky News, which began to change the relationship between television audiences and those in power. And Sky’s willingness to continue to “challenge the status quo”, at this election and in future, meant “we will begin to see the release of television’s full potential as a force for democratic empowerment”.

Sky led initiatives, such as the forthcoming campaign for cameras in courts announced last night, were the result of questioning how to tear down barriers “to further release the true power of television: to inform, to engage and to challenge both the public and the political classes,” he said.