If knowledge is power in Washington, then some of the most powerful people, for a moment every year, were once sweaty young interns who knew before the rest of the world whether same-sex marriage was legal or the fate of health care. , as they knew. they literally rushed to deliver printed copies of Supreme Court decisions to TV correspondents waiting in the summer heat.
Their only weakness was the risk of appearing on national television in front of all their bosses and colleagues.
The so-called “intern race” was the quickest way for the world to discover a Supreme Court decision in the paper era. And the faster they ran, the faster the news spread.
But now that the high court is finally entering the Internet era, decisions are published online immediately. So the interns have stopped running, and the annual race of high-stakes nerds is going the way of the once-ubiquitous pay phones inside the Capitol, where reporters rushed to dictate news to their home offices before their competitors.
“Do I regret the fact that Supreme Court decisions are more widely available and transparent? Of course not,” said Pete Williams, who retired in 2022 after decades covering the courtroom for NBC News. “Undeniably, though, it drains the drama a bit, when you’re on the sidelines and America is hanging on your every word. Those days are kind of over.”
During the pandemic, the court stopped meeting in person and decisions were published exclusively online while the judges spoke on a conference call. Today, paper hard copies are back in the building, but there is no real need for the athletics internship program as decisions are posted online immediately (although some still rush to provide copies to correspondents who prefer to read in paper instead of on iPads).
On Monday morning, the court will hand down the final rulings of the term, including the long-awaited decision on whether Donald Trump enjoys immunity from his criminal cases, but it will be a PDF, not a paper copy, that will bring the news to the public. most people. .
Court watchers and former interns agree the change is for the better, making the infamously traditional high court more accessible to the public. But they also agree that there is something romantically analogous about the tradition that they will miss.
The quarter-mile run from the court’s public information office inside the building to the TV cameras outside was “a kind of platonic ideal of what journalism is” – literally bringing the news to the people – he said Jess McHughwho was an intern at CNN in 2014 and is now a journalist and writer based in Paris.
“Once you say something, it becomes reality in the world. So whether it’s good news or bad news, you’re in this liminal space of news as you’re publishing it,” McHugh said. “To the extent that an asthmatic nerd can take any kind of race seriously, I took it very seriously.”
Before everything went online, runners were long employed in newsrooms, government agencies, and others that needed to transmit information quickly. The Supreme Court’s “intern management” first gained widespread national prominence on the night of the Bush v. Board of Education decision. Gore in 2000, when the court was placed in the unprecedented position of essentially deciding a presidential election.
Cable news was still relatively young and competition was fierce. Millions of Americans tuned into the news networks, eagerly awaiting an update from the court. Then, as now, cameras were not allowed on the court.
Then, like white smoke above the Sistine Chapel signaling the selection of a new pope, the interns appeared, rushing across the dark square to relay the decision to the news before their competitors.
“The interns were essential because it was the only way we could find out what was going on,” said Williams, who was one of the reporters outside the courthouse that night.
The “intern race” matured into a meme in the internet’s irreverent adolescence of the 2010s, when new media outlets like BuzzFeed addressed the interns running around with fake ESPN enthusiasm and crowned winners.
Advantages were measured in a matter of seconds or minutes, but in the competitive world of live news, every moment mattered.
Even after the court began publishing decisions online, the interns were still faster. For example, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, the justices began announcing their decision in court at 10 a.m. Interns began turning in paper copies at 10:01 a.m., but the decision wasn’t posted online until 10:05 a.m., according to SCOTUSBlog.
Now, the court publishes decisions online immediately, and sometimes even before paper copies are distributed.
And yes, the interns really did race to win.
“It was like a madhouse. It was chaos. People just try to make the decision and then run away and try not to bump into each other,” said one of the winners, who requested anonymity due to current professional considerations. “Someone tried to rip one out of my hand, but luckily I was stronger.”
“Obviously, you want to be ethical, kind and polite, but you want to win and you have to do what’s best for your people and your network,” the former intern added.
The competition was good-natured and professional, but you don’t get a prestigious internship in Washington without at least a little competitive motivation.
“You wanted to be first. You wanted to show your bosses that you could be the fastest runner or do whatever,” said former NBC News councilman Gary Grumbach, who is still with the network. “If the CNN guy is in front of you, you’re running to catch up to him. You don’t want to be second, you want to be first.”
Their uniforms became familiar – business casual on top, running shoes on the bottom.
Former runners recalled trips and route planning with superiors. One, upon returning for season two, said he Googled interns from other networks to size up the competition. Some said it was better to position themselves closer to the Bankers’ Box that held the photocopied decisions, while others said it was smarter to wait because the first to receive copies sometimes got stuck in the crowd.
The route is somewhere between 400 and 800 meters long, depending on the camera the intern was heading towards, and temperatures were usually in the 80s and 90s, as decisions typically take place in June.
After exiting the public information office with papers in hand, the interns walked briskly – Supreme Court police strictly enforced the court’s no-office policy – before bursting into the sunshine through a side entrance on the north side of the courthouse. This led to an external passage along the facade before emerging into the open marble of the court’s neoclassical plaza on the left side of its columnar facade if facing the building.
At that point, in full view of hundreds of protesters and dozens of cameras broadcasting live, the interns turned on their afterburners to run across the square and deliver the package to correspondents, often live, who immediately began reporting the incident. News.
“It’s such an important moment in Washington that I still think about it a lot,” said Summer Delaney, a former ABC News intern who oversaw the court’s landmark ruling on the Affordable Care Act in 2012.
Delaney now runs Collaboration, a hiring platform she founded, so she thinks a lot about how many internships can be disappointing for both interns and employers. When she was an intern, someone joked with her that running would be the most important thing she would do all summer, but it was true, she said.
And it offered a valuable lesson about journalism and information sharing. Perhaps counterintuitively, she found it was more important to be accurate first, as she witnessed several networks initially misinterpret the Affordable Care Act ruling.
“It was a great experience and I’m sad that future interns won’t have that experience,” Delaney added. “But it’s Washington. There are always ways for interns to make a difference.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
