Well, this is it, my final day at the courthouse during the Libby deliberations. I don’t know if this will be the day that the jury reaches a verdict. I would love it to be, but I have my doubts. So, stepping away from the reporting on minutiae and the speculation about what it means, let me return to some personal thoughts about the bigger picture.

All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go…

The tune winds its way through my head as I wait. I’ve left my bags at Union Station and will hop on a train back home when the day is done. In the 1992 Vice Presidential debate in Atlanta Georgia, Admiral Stockdale asked the now famous questions, “Who am I? Why am I here?” His line was met with laughter and applause. He may or may not have helped out his case for the election, but he was honest and hopefully got a few people to sit back and think.

He continued on, saying, “I'm not a politician -- everybody knows that. So don't expect me to use the language of the Washington insider.” Well, I’m not a journalist, at least in the traditional sense of the word -- everybody knows that. So, don’t expect me to use the language of the Washington court reporter.

So, why am I here? Well, on the most superficial level, it would have been great to be here for a historic moment, the verdict in the Libby trial. I may, or may not get that opportunity. Yet as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”. I’ve traveled down here hopefully. We may not arrive at a verdict by the time I leave, but that is okay. I’m coming away with something more important.

During my four days here, I’ve gotten to know some of the reporters on the court beat. As much as some of my blogging friends dislike the traditional media, and there are some very valid issues with how news is gathered and distributed in our country, most of the reporters that I have met are committed to their craft and to “reporting in a way that is worthy of the First Amendment” as I heard a great thinker on journalism once say.

Sure, they are doing it for a living. We all need to make a living. You hear lines like “As long as the check clears, do whatever you want with my story” bantered about but when you sit down and talk with the reporters, you find an idealism that unfortunately doesn’t often make it out into the stories.

Likewise, Judge Walton, and I believe most of the people involved in the judicial process here are people to be deeply respected. As I mentioned in a previous post, his rant to a young black parole violator was priceless and will be one of the moments I will remember most vividly from the whole experience.

What is my take away from the whole event? As much as I’d like to see a verdict, seeing the verdict and whatever that verdict is, are less important. What matters is that we all come away with a better appreciation of the role of the fourth estate and the role of the judicial branch. I know I have and I hope others will as well.

I hope that this little experiment of having a media room in a courthouse with public Wifi, open to bloggers and citizen journalists as well as traditional journalists will become a model for all courthouses in the future. I hope that journalism professors, media educators, and high school civics teachers get opportunities to send students to such media rooms around the country.

Oh, and I do still hope that we get a verdict today.
(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)