A new date has been set for the Regional Judges and Journalists Conference in the Eastern Panhandle. The meeting previously scheduled for early January was postponed due to inclement weather.
The meeting will be 8:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Friday, April 30, at the Berkeley County Judicial Center, 380 West South Street, in Martinsburg. The conference will be held in the Fourth Floor Grand Jury Suite.
Print and broadcast reporters, photographers, editors, and judicial officers from the northeastern part of West Virginia are invited. This includes all counties of Berkeley, Grant, Jefferson, Hampshire, Hardy, Mineral, Morgan, Pendleton, Randolph, and Tucker. Anyone from elsewhere in West Virginia may also attend if they wish.
The purpose of the meeting is to encourage better communication between the judiciary and the media, so judicial officers and reporters can better understand each others’ jobs and perspectives.
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said in 1997, “The public’s confidence in the judiciary hinges on the public’s perception of it, and that perception necessarily hinges on the media’s portrayal of the legal system.”
Judges are the arbiters of order and common sense. They are the protectors of fairness and that elusive quality known as justice. Without reporters, the important messages they send would be heard by no one,” Linda Deutsch, an Associated Press Correspondent, was quoted as saying in the Freedom Forum Calendar in 1997.
The meeting will include a panel discussion about access to information and an overview of the West Virginia court system for reporters who are new to covering the courts. There also will be an open discussion to allow the media to raise issues of concern to them.
This meeting is a follow-up to a Judges and Journalists Workshop held at the fall 2006 Judicial Association Conference in Wheeling and regional conferences held in 2008 in Ohio and Putnam Counties. The first Wheeling workshop was sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Courts and Media.
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