In the camera's eye

Put both houses of legislature on cable - and the Internet

Published June 25, 2007 at midnight

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We welcome the news that Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff wants to take up Comcast on its offer of two cable channels to televise proceedings from the House floor. And congratulations to Comcast for making the offer, too.

Romanoff hopes to have cameras in place before the next legislative session begins in January. Not that Colorado will be in the forefront of the movement toward wider exposure of its legislative process; the Bell Policy Center, which advocated taking this step in a report last year, says that 34 other states already provide some televised coverage of their legislature's activities.

Now that Romanoff has shown the way, we hope Senate leaders also recognize that it's good policy to let the public see how the legislature works. If the House can be ready by January, surely the Senate can be too.

Desirable as this step is, though, it doesn't go far enough. The legislature already provides live audio coverage from the House and Senate chambers when they are in session, as well as from the committee rooms. That works well in general, though proceedings are sometimes hard to follow. But the television coverage will not include committee hearings, largely because a number of different committees may meet simultaneously.

Also, not everybody has cable television; not all those who do subscribe to Comcast; and not everybody has TiVo to record what's happening in one chamber while they're watching the other, or when they can't be at home.

Those reservations add up to one missing thing: the Internet.

Here's what Denver has to say about its television coverage: "The City and County of Denver is now providing streaming video of Denver 8 TV programming. You can view the channel LIVE as it is scheduled, or you can watch a wide variety of videos on demand, including archived coverage of City Council meetings and many city-produced local shows."

Yes, we do understand that not everybody has Internet access at home. But we'd venture to guess that most of the people who would choose to watch legislative committee hearings probably do, and those who don't can visit a local library and use its computers to watch. That's practical with video on demand, though not with live broadcasts.

We're not worried about legislators or witnesses playing to the camera once they're being filmed. Experience in courtrooms with and without cameras shows that if the camera is always there, people soon forget about it.

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