Politics & Power Quote by Lance Ito

Ito is selling transparency as civic education, but the line carries the double-edge of a judge speaking after America’s most televised courtroom spectacle: the O.J. Simpson trial. On its face, it’s a defense of daylight - that continuous public access demystifies procedure, rules of evidence, objections, and the often slow grind between accusation and verdict. He frames the audience not as gawkers but as students, watching due process in real time.

The subtext is more complicated. “Every day, all day” reads like pride and warning at once. The trial didn’t just reveal “how the system works”; it revealed how performance can become part of the system’s functioning when cameras are present. Lawyers calibrate for the lens, witnesses become characters, and the judge’s own authority is tested by an invisible jury of millions. Ito’s phrasing - “a lot of value” - is conspicuously measured, an attempt to reclaim institutional legitimacy without directly litigating the circus atmosphere critics blamed on him.

Context does the heavy lifting. In the early 1990s, trust in policing and courts was already volatile (Rodney King, LA uprisings). Televised justice promised accountability while also turning trauma and racial conflict into consumable drama. Ito’s intent, then, is partly philosophical and partly self-protective: he’s arguing that visibility strengthens democracy, even when what’s visible is messy, adversarial, and unsettling. The brilliance of the line is its restraint: it asks viewers to treat discomfort as a feature of due process, not proof of its failure.