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LawBeat watches the journalists who watch the law. It is meant to start a conversation — here and in the classroom — about the quality of journalism focusing on the justice system, lawyers and the law. All posts are by Mark Obbie unless otherwise noted. Go to this archive to read more about LawBeat's focus and to this page about what motivated its creation, and how it evolved. Go here for the 10 Deadliest Sins of Legal Reporting post. And go here for blanket disclosure of Obbie's conflicts of interest.
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| A few of her least favorite things |
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| The American Lawyer |
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| Fri, June 01, 2007 |
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Dahlia Lithwick's "Dicta" column in the June American Lawyer lists the 10 things she'd change about legal reporting. It's a very good list, though at least in one place (exhorting Anna Nicole reporters to focus on probate's fine points) sounding a bit wonkier than normal for Lithwick, who specializes in making the law fun and interesting. Here's my fave:
4. Talk to the judges. And judges, talk to the press. Judges across the country feel like they are under siege. They feel that their positions have been irreparably politicized (see items 9 and 6, supra), and yet for the most part, they still operate as though it were 1802 and someone was waiting with a horse and buggy outside Ye Olde Courthouse to pick up the opinion and drive it to the next town. Judges are beginning to figure out that dignified silence will only get them so far and that there is a time and a place to speak to the press. Reporters need to figure out how to meet them halfway. With the exception of that nutty Anna Nicole Smith judge. Reporters should avoid him.
I'll accept it as a friendly amendment to my "10 deadliest sins of legal reporting."
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Posted at 09:13 AM
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| To the dogs |
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| ESPN.com |
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| Fri, June 01, 2007 |
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Andrew Cohen neatly dissects this ESPN story by NFL reporter Len Pasquarelli on the Michael Vick dog-fighting investigation. What has Cohen so worked up? Pasquarelli's anonymously sourced speculation that Vick, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, is about to be indicted. Cohen deems that a smear based on admittedly inconclusive evidence. I agree. Witness this blind quote by a law enforcement source:
"There are some holes, definitely, and that's why [investigators] are digging for more information. You want more than just smoke. You're always looking for the smoking gun.
"I mean, what you think you know and what you know you know, and what you can prove to other people you know ... well, they aren't always the same. But this is a fluid thing, so we'll see where it goes."
Huh? This is the basis for concluding that investigators believe they have enough to indict? What's especially weird is that Pasquarelli goes on to quote the prosecutor by name saying essentially the same thing. Which makes the suspicious among us suspect that Pasquarelli is relying overly heavily on one very talkative source, who flits in and out of attributable patter. But I wouldn't want to indict Pasquarelli on that charge. The facts just aren't in. Yet.
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Posted at 09:42 AM
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| Black trial bloggers |
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| The New York Times |
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| Mon, June 04, 2007 |
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Lia Miller's story questioning conflicts of interest infesting the news coverage of the Conrad Black trial reads a bit like a Sunday sermon -- of the very boring, droning variety -- while its intended targets crack wise and toss spitballs from the balcony. On the surface, the story makes sense, especially to American readers: Black, the media tycoon on trial in Chicago on fraud charges (whose obsessive trial coverage in Canada I noted here), is putting on his defense. Before Donald Trump steals the show, the defense witness is a former Black associate, Ken Whyte. Whyte happens to be the current publisher and editor in chief of the country's leading newsmagazine, Maclean's, which happens to employ Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, as a columnist. So how's the Maclean's trial correspondent going to cover his boss, Miller wonders. The answer can't be found in Miller's story, a straightforward, Timesean bit of even-handed reportage. Meanwhile, the free-wheeling Canadian writers commenting on the trial, on each other, on the Times, and on everything else, are hooting and groaning and carrying on in ever-so-colorful ways that make the prim questions of conflicts of interest seem beside the point. Check out these related dispatches in Toronto Life, and by the Maclean's writer in question, Mark Steyn, here and here.
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Posted at 09:59 AM
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| Gavel Awards and V&E, revisited |
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| Mon, June 04, 2007 |
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Last month, in noting that the Silver Gavel Award winners had been named, I criticized the American Bar Association for taking Vinson & Elkins' sponsorship money. Given how Enron-related disputes are still in the news, and are very much a legal story, I thought the ABA had walked into a needless conflict (as V&E is forever entangled in the mess that was Enron). I suppose I also assumed that this was like any other sponsorship deal: an association uses it to bring in revenue, and the sponsor uses it to promote itself.
The real story of V&E's sponsorship of the Gavel Awards is more interesting, less obviously compromised, and certainly different from the scenario that I assumed to be true. I wish I had done some reporting when I first wrote about it. To make amends, after a reader (and not V&E or the ABA) called my attention to this, I've talked to some of the people involved and have a different story to tell about how V&E came to be prominently listed as a financial supporter of the Gavel Awards.
The awards have long been known as the most prominent honor in legal journalism. There are local legal-reporting awards, but nothing like the Gavels on the national stage. But, a few years ago, the ABA cut the awards' budget to zero. Perhaps a combination of factors -- the ABA's financial problems at the time and a dulled sense of the awards' rich history and importance -- put the awards committee on the hunt for donations to keep the awards afloat. That's when Mark Curriden entered the picture. Last year, Curriden -- V&E's Dallas-based director of communications -- was in his first full year on the awards committee when he learned of the committee's financial straits. He returned to his firm to beg for enough money to put on the awards ceremony and dinner. That $10,000 donation, he says, had "zero" to do with Enron-related image rehabilitation -- and everything to do with V&E's public spirit. It's likely that the firm's backing also speaks to its regard for Curriden, a respected legal journalist, most recently at the Dallas Morning News, and a Gavel Award winner himself (in 2000, for this book).
The awards committee chair, Gary Slaiman of the D.C. office of Bingham McCutchen, then pressed a successful campaign to restore some of the ABA funding. The ABA's new, smaller budget for the awards -- combined with donations from V&E and a number of other individual lawyers and firms (including Slaiman and Bingham) -- still falls short of full funding, but is enough to give the awards a "pretty secure" future, Slaiman says.
I know Curriden, respect him as a first-rate legal journalist, and believe he is motivated by a desire to promote good legal reporting. "This year we had so many great series of articles" seeking Gavel Awards that it was especially difficult to choose, he says. "There's some really good legal journalism going on." I agree, and the Gavel Awards can take some credit for encouraging that reporting, and putting a spotlight on it. Thanks to Curriden, Slaiman, V&E and others, the awards may convince a news organization or two to keep paying for quality, in-depth reporting on the justice system. And they may lure a few more students to pursue this sort of work rather than joining the crowd that feeds the appetite for junk-food journalism about Britney, et al.
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Posted at 02:04 PM
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| WaPo beat change |
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| Tue, June 05, 2007 |
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Out with the old, in with the ... old. Chuck Lane, the Washington Post's SCOTUS beat reporter who's been out for most of this term on a book leave, recently returned as the end-of-term crunch heats up (well, it's supposed to heat up any week now). But he's only there as temp help. Bob Barnes, Lane's interim replacement, is now Lane's permanent replacement. After a one-month stint helping Barnes on the court beat, Lane's headed to the editorial pages, Barnes confirmed in an e-mail today. It's a sensible move all around: Barnes, previously a politics writer, has been doing solid work this term. Lane, the former New Republic editor, will bring some law savvy to the opinion pages. Lane said previously that his book is about a post-Reconstruction Supreme Court opinion, but I'm trying to find out more.
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Posted at 11:29 AM
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| S**t! It was a f***ing split opinion!! |
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| Fortune |
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| Tue, June 05, 2007 |
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Roger Parloff lends new perspective to yesterday's 2nd Circuit ruling on the FCC's indecency regulations. Specifically, eagle-eyed Parloff reveals, the panel's vote wasn't 2-1 against the FCC across the board. It was, in fact, 3-0 regarding regulation of the word "shit," and 2-1 regarding "fuck." Parloff has fun explaining how that happened -- and, amusingly, why his earlier and extraordinarily good coverage of the case in Fortune isn't available on CNNMoney.com.
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Posted at 02:08 PM
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| Love story has some twists |
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| Associated Press |
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| Wed, June 06, 2007 |
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I've only been half-aware of the case of Genarlow Wilson, the former honors student who's more than two years into a 10-year prison sentence for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old when he was 17. Those are the facts that everyone conversant with the case is able to recite. But this story by Shannon McCaffrey (via How Appealing) -- pegged to today's hearing on Wilson's post-conviction challenge -- puts the conviction in a different light. "This was not two star-crossed lovers on a date," one Georgia legislator wrote. Indeed. Have I just missed the gray areas in this story, or have the reporters covering it not explained often and clearly enough the circumstances of the sexual encounter and Wilson's conviction? Ten years still sounds wildly excessive, but Wilson's defenders might want to rethink the Romeo-and-Juliet theme.
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Posted at 10:39 AM
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| Wassermania |
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| Wed, June 06, 2007 |
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Rumors swirl around the pending sale of American Lawyer Media, the largest legal journalism company, fueled in part by this Reuters report last week (I'm just now catching up to it, thanks to Legal Blog Watch and Law Marketing Blog). Private equity firms get top billing in the anonymously sourced Reuters story, contradicting earlier blogosphere speculation of a buyout by Thomson as it merges with none other than Reuters. The two most intriguing (ominous?) aspects, if any of this is true: that Jimmy Finkelstein, former CEO of the National Law Journal side of the ALM marriage, is supposedly attempting a comeback; and that Reuters is toying with creating some sort of legal-news wire, which to my mind is a response to Bloomberg's aggressive moves on that front over the last few years (with more than a few NLJ veterans).
Meanwhile, it's hard not to recall the rumors during the sale of American Lawyer Media back in 1997, when everyone but the eventual buyer -- Bruce Wasserstein's private equity arm -- was said to be winning the auction at any given moment. I'm just glad I'm not living through yet another round of that.
What I don't get -- simple-minded though I am about high finance -- is why Wasserstein doesn't see any strategic value in continuing to hold onto ALM, given his ownership of such key business-news assets as Penton Media and The Deal (granted, New York magazine, his marquee property, doesn't quite fit that B2B portfolio). Hey, Bruce, I gotta tip for you: Dow Jones is looking mighty available. Focus on buying that and leave poor little ALM where it is!
My previous posts on the ALM sale are here and here.
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Posted at 05:48 PM
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| Putting meat on bones of judge story |
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| Washington Post |
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| Mon, June 11, 2007 |
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It's amazing what two weeks -- and enterprising reporting -- can do to improve a story. Late last month, in the immediate aftermath of Monica Goodling's revelations about political appointees among immigration judges, the LA Times' Richard Schmitt took a crack at following up with a story that I found lacking. It was on the right track but just didn't prove its point. Now come WaPo Justice reporters Amy Goldstein and Dan Eggen with this front-pager. The second graf has all the specificity that the earlier LA Times story lacked:
At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law, Justice Department, immigration court and other records show.
How well do they prove that and show how their analysis was done? So-so. It would be better if they spelled out what, in their view, constitutes Republican connections and immigration experience. We're left essentially taking their word for it that their analysis was logical and had integrity. I'm willing to do that, in part because there are multiple examples. But more skeptical readers will want more. Why not publish your findings, judge by judge, at least on the Web? But credit where it's due: Goldstein and Eggen have advanced the ball by doing the hard work of examining and analyzing the details rather than just quoting what others are saying.
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Posted at 12:10 PM
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| News from the IRE Conference |
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| Mon, June 11, 2007 |
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My trip last week to the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, in Phoenix, showed me once again how effectively IRE has staked its claim to the high ground of enterprise journalism. While much of our business frittered away column inches and airtime on Paris Hilton's jail saga, several hundred journalists from around the world heard four days of panels packed with experts and consumed piles of published work from the past year that prove there are still muckrakers and shoeleather reporters shedding light on real problems in every corner of the country and globe (though you might not have realized it for all the doom-and-gloom talk from the panels about the fate of the business). Best of all, the conference attracted scores of young journalists and students eager to chase wrongdoing and systemic problems rather than joining the packs chasing Linsay and Britney whatstheirnames. It all added up to a snapshot of journalism that that's not often acknowledged by the public, or even by news organizations themselves.
Here are the IRE Award winners, with loads of links to great work. And here are some tidbits I picked up relevant to our mission here at LawBeat:
New innocence project at Mizzou: Steve Weinberg, former IRE executive director and my mentor and friend, is starting an innocence project using student journalists and faculty expertise from law and elsewhere at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Weinberg has been researching and writing about wrongful convictions and prosecutorial misconduct for many years, including this report published by the Center for Public Integrity. I'll post more about this new project once I've confirmed some details.
Student work wins award: University of North Texas students produced this investigative police story that Fort Worth Weekly published in March 2006. The subject: dangerous overuse of Taser stun devices by police, and blatant disregard for legal requirements to keep and disclose records on Taser use. It won an IRE award -- and earned broader exposure among the IRE attendees for the good work being done at UNT.
Inspiration strikes: With several hundred leading journalists attending and speaking, including appearances by Sy Hersh and Dana Priest, it struck me as remarkable that the most inspiring call to arms came from a practicing lawyer. Dan Barr, a Phoenix media lawyer with Perkins Coie Brown & Bain, chastised the press for willingly handing courts all the ammo they need to hide the public's business. "We're not covering the courts anymore," Barr said at a June 9 panel with two other media lawyers on current First Amendment issues. "We're not there." When reporters aren't covering courts -- because the business has "the attention span of a gnat" -- then they obviously won't be demanding access to sealed court and police records or challenging restricted access to hearings, Barr said. Even when they protest, it's hard to argue with a straight face that they work for tireless defenders of the public interest. "We have to get into the game again," he said, adding later, "The best lobbying we do is [by] doing great work. . . . Write great stuff."
New Berkeley fellowships: One focus of newly announced fellowships in investigative reporting at U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is criminal justice, according to panelists discussing new models for publishing journalism (such as university-supported projects). That's confirmed in this press release.
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Posted at 05:26 PM
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| Mizzou law-journo innocence project |
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| Tue, June 12, 2007 |
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More details on the new innocence project mentioned in the previous post, all from an e-mail exchange I had with Steve Weinberg:
The project's most notable feature is the collaboration of law and journalism schools. Law and journalism professors will oversee work by their students to investigate and report on cases. (That strikes me as an exciting advance in the art of innocence projects, which were pioneered on the law side by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld at the Cardozo School of Law at New York's Yeshiva University and in journalism by David Protess at Northwestern's Medill School. The two discplines typically work separately, if symbiotically.)
Weinberg spent years trying to find money to start the project. Finally he got the ear of the Elson Floyd, president of the University of Missouri system, whose intervention pumped $300,000 over three years into the program's launch. The cost is shared by Weinberg's home campus in Columbia, MU's law school in Kansas City, and Floyd's office. John Grisham waived his speaking fee at an event that raised another $100,000. Students will earn credit for their work, starting as early as January.
Let me know if you're aware of other innocence projects where journalists and lawyers (or students of both) work together.
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Posted at 12:00 PM
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| Another qualified rave for Thomas bio |
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| New York Times Book Review |
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| Wed, June 13, 2007 |
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Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson reviews Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher's Clarence Thomas bio in next Sunday's Times Book Review. He calls it "impeccably researched and probing" on the racial and personal elements of Thomas' life, but "pedestrian" as legal analysis. This take on "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas" -- which I've blogged about previously here and here -- is consistent with the review two months ago in the two reporters' own paper, the Washington Post, by Yale's Kenji Yoshino.
Patterson draws a critical line between the book's treatment of Thomas before and after the Anita Hill fiasco:
Up to the point of Thomas’s confirmation hearings, this book is a finely drawn portrait that surpasses all previous attempts to understand him. The remainder of the work is more wide-angled.
The authors must be pleased that just when publicity had died down following publication of the book and excerpts in the Post in April, the Times stirs it up again. Now all they need is a controversial Thomas opinion in the waning days of the term. Note to Doubleday flacks. Put those talk-show bookers' numbers on speed dial starting Monday a.m.!
More substantively, I wonder if the light-on-law slams are fair. Merida and Fletcher are not legal reporters. The book grew out of a Post Magazine piece, and their mission was to look at Thomas through a racial lens. Must all Supreme Court justices be defined largely by their jurisprudence? It's impossible to avoid substantive law entirely, especially when the subject's legal thought is as singular as Thomas'. But I give the authors credit for sticking to their declared topic in a reportedly readable narrative (can you tell I haven't read it yet? It's on my to-do list!) with personal insights and history that matter when we're getting to know any public official.
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Posted at 04:24 PM
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| A judge who never got over it |
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| Thu, June 14, 2007 |
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Relying on anonymous sources for second-hand, self-interested accounts of a judge's comments has cost the Boston Herald $3.4 million. Overlawyered links to the short story on the payment, and to previous stories on the clash between writer Dave Wedge and Judge Ernest Murphy. Wedge relied on unhappy prosecutors for his report on Murphy's supposed insensitivity toward a 14-year-old rape victim and other crime victims in his court. (The most incendiary quote attributed to the judge: that the victim should "get over it.") The judge accused Wedge of putting an overly negative spin on what was actually said, of not reliably confirming the statements made behind closed doors, and of outright fabrication -- all denied by Wedge and the paper, but ultimately believed by a jury and Massachusetts' high court.
Lessons learned: Judges are not libel-proof. Make them mad enough, they may sue. And no matter how strenuously we believe in the facts that we report, if our methods appear slapdash, we might lose. Big.
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Posted at 07:15 AM
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| Paris Hilton, by the numbers |
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| The Los Angeles Times |
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| Thu, June 14, 2007 |
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Did Paris Hilton get special treatment? Yes, but not in the way she might have hoped. The LA Times' Jack Leonard and Doug Smith crunched the numbers on 2 million jail releases and found 1,500 cases in a recent six-year span with similar charges and sentences. Because of the jail's overcrowding and early-release program, Hilton's original four-day stint was about on par. Now, if she serves 23 days as expected, she's doing more time than 80 percent of similarly situated defendants, the Times says, adding that it could find no other cases where a released defendant was hauled back to jail (probably because there aren't many other cases that attract a 24/7 media horde hollering about cushy treatment). To its credit, the Times includes this tell-all methodology with a chart full of numbers:
Methodology: For this article, The Times electronically searched seven years of L.A. County Jail booking and release records to identify cases similar to Paris Hilton's. Those selected were initially jailed on misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence and subsequently sentenced to jail following charges of probation violation or driving on a suspended license. All cases that included more serious charges were excluded. Because of limitations in the data, cases having more serious prior convictions or convictions in other counties could not always be excluded. Nor was it possible to determine the charges on which the defendants were actually convicted. The data spanned 1999 through 2005.
I'd hoped to ignore the Hilton saga, but Leonard's and Smith's good work is just the kind of enterprise reporting that I'm on the lookout for. (Linked via Legal Times.)
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Posted at 11:43 AM
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| Who's the zealot? |
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| Mon, June 18, 2007 |
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No one can match KC Johnson's encyclopedic knowledge of the Duke lacrosse case at Durham-in-Wonderland, but he's become too biased to take seriously on the topic of Duff Wilson's coverage of the case for The New York Times. In this post -- as the case against DA Michael Nifong reached a crescendo (with his resignation and disbarment) -- Johnson selectively quotes from this Wilson story on Sunday to portray Wilson once again as a Nifong partisan who was a willing accomplice in the politically-correct smearing of the Duke students (a theme Johnson has hammered on for months). Johnson's anti-Wilson crusade is rooted in fact and reason. Wilson's coverage earlier in the case was indeed pro-prosecution even after doubt was turning into plain fact about the injustice of the rape charges. But Johnson has long since been blinded by his anger at Wilson and the Times. To paint Wilson's latest story as intentionally slanted toward Nifong's side is plain silly. Wilson plays the news straight, calls the ethics panel's verdict against Nifong "scathing," quotes Nifong's victims extensively, and clearly focuses on news that's unavoidably focused on Nifong. Johnson seems to want every news story to parrot his partisan rants, which only shows the difference between a blogger-commentator and a journalist.
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Posted at 07:35 AM
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| Judges v. Journalists |
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| Legal Times |
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| Fri, June 22, 2007 |
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Judges are mad as hell at the media and aren't going to take it anymore. That's the underlying theme in the rising number of libel suits brought by judges, reports Tony Mauro. Multimillion-dollar verdicts won by judges against the Kane County (Illinois) Chronicle and the Boston Herald represent a "whole different climate now," Mauro quotes media defense lawyer Bruce Sanford as saying.
The most surprising factoid is in the story's second graf: 25 judges sued for libel in 2005, nearly 10 percent of all libel suits filed nationwide. The stat isn't sourced, but later Mauro quotes the likely source, the authoritative Media Law Resource Center.
Journalists already have constitutional protection in suits brought by public officials. The protection makes a plaintiff's victory less likely -- and all but rules out further legal protections for the media. So Mauro's sources suggest that the solution to this problem is improving bench-press relations and encouraging judges to fight unwelcome speech with more speech, rather than with litigation. That makes sense. But achieving universal good behavior among judges is about as likely as doing the same among journalists.
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Posted at 08:42 AM
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| Timing is everything |
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| The Washington Post |
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| Mon, June 25, 2007 |
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I wonder what sense it makes to preview pending decisions in Monday morning's paper when one or more of the remaining major cases will be decided within hours. Bob Barnes does that today with a story that looks back at the controversial opinions of this term -- and forward to the remaining ones, focusing on controversies that no longer will be a mystery come 10 a.m. EDT.
What assumptions do we make about when people read daily papers? And when they read those dailies online? Answers to these questions are evolving rapidly, as people consume more news online, and that news is syndicated far and wide across the Web and a host of other info-gadgets. We reflexively believe, and make news judgments based on the belief, that news is consumed as quickly as it's produced. Obviously that's not the case. If anything, the digital realm gives news a longer shelf life. But, even if that weren't a factor, I wouldn't want to think that the excellent story I produce for this morning's paper is largely outdated within hours -- before many people have even had a chance to see it. If I were choosing when to run stories like Barnes' and pondering who my typical readers are, I'd focus more on the harried family that doesn't have much newspaper-reading downtime until the evening, not the stereotypical (but increasingly marginal) New York and D.C. commuter who dutifully polishes off the morning papers on the train ride in.
Barnes' story would have made more sense running in yesterday's Post. Or saved for a day-after piece that reacts smartly to whatever is about to happen in a few short hours.
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Posted at 06:07 AM
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| Don't bogart that definition, my friend |
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| Tue, June 26, 2007 |
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The rest of the media can ponder the Greater Meaning of this week's major Supreme Court output. We here at LawBeat have this to offer:
Let the record reflect that the Supreme Court, and virtually the entire press corps reporting on its momentus "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" decision, has decided that the word "bong" is sufficiently embedded in the vernacular that it requires no explanation. Of the more than a dozen reporters' accounts of the First Amendment decision that I saw -- including the Times (NY and LA), Journal, ABC, USA Today, Time, SCOTUSblog, AP (here and here), Reuters, Bloomberg, Christian Science Monitor, and MTV News -- only Chuck Lane at the Post and Bill Mears at CNN saw fit to give bong-ignorant readers a clue. Lane's version: "A bong is a water pipe commonly used to smoke marijuana." Mears was less explicit: "'Bong,' as noted in the appeal filed with the justices, 'is a slang term for drug paraphernalia.'" No one else bothered -- including writers of the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions, not even in footnotes, though Justice John Paul Stevens' dissent does take a Mearsean angle, mentioning the banner's "reference to drug paraphernalia." Yeah, John Paul, like you don't know.
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Posted at 08:03 AM
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| Explaining a controlled prison break |
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| Sacramento Bee |
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| Wed, June 27, 2007 |
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Andy Furillo shows how a few extra phone calls and other modest forms of digging can lend important perspective to a daily story. Furillo previews today's hearing that could lead to the early release of tens of thousands of inmates in California's overcrowded prisons. It's the sort of thing that can drive citizens bonkers -- and they're likely to vent their spleens at high-handed federal courts issuing such release orders. But Furillo does enough of his homework to show how the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act works, how it's been used in the past, and why it's being used in California. The story neither condemns nor defends. It educates. If citizens want to vent now, they'll at least do so with some facts in hand. (Link via Criminal Justice Journalists.)
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Posted at 03:50 PM
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| School deseg stories: The Quote Count |
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| Fri, June 29, 2007 |
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When reporting on a 185-page decision full of passionate writing by the justices, do SCOTUS reporters give outsiders much room to react in first-day stories on yesterday's historic school integration decision? The morning-after stories provide an interesting snapshot of where different reporters come down on the question of whether to rely solely on their own analysis, and quotes from the opinions, or to give voice to others with a stake in the battle.
In analyzing the reporters' choices, I don't intend to paint this as a choice between using talking heads versus your own reportorial brain, or a clash between an open forum and a closed mind. The choices are influenced by a number of factors. Did the writer analyze the decision's likely impact or place it in context of the Court's changes (in which case, reaction quotes are more prominent)? Did the writer break out of the courthouse walls to see how the decision might play out across the country (in which case, the heavy use of quotes is ambitious enterprise reporting, not quoting for its own sake)? Did the newspaper break the stories up so that one focuses exclusively on the language in the opinions while others collect reactions and analyze the impact?
So a reporter's use of outsiders' quotes isn't necessarily a barometer of that reporter's philosophy on such things. But that won't stop me from ranking the reporters by their use of quoted sources outside of the opinions themselves in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. What's the ranking prove? Just that there's a wide range of tactics in covering a story like this on Day One.
Here's how the reporters stack up, ranging from the least use of outside sources to the heaviest use:
1. Tie: Linda Greenhouse, New York Times, Lyle Denniston, SCOTUSblog
No outside sources quoted
2. David Savage, LA Times
Two quoted sources, starting in 20th graf
3. Jan Crawford Greenburg and Ariane de Vogue, ABC
Two quoted sources, starting in 9th graf
4. Warren Richey, Christian Science Monitor
Two quoted sources, starting in 8th graf
5. Bob Barnes, Washington Post
Three quoted sources, starting in 13th graf
6. Naftali Bendavid, Chicago Tribune
Three quoted sources, starting in 11th graf
7. Joan Biskupic, USA Today
Three quoted sources, starting in 5th graf
8. Tony Mauro, Legal Times
Six quoted sources, starting in 11th graf
9. Jess Bravin and Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd)
Eight quoted sources, starting in 16th graf
Most of the stories quoting sources achieved rough parity between pro and con, and no one source hogged the mic. The most frequently quoted sources in all of the above tallied stories netted only three quotes apiece. They were a party to the case on the plaintiffs' side, Sharon Browne of Pacific Legal Foundation, and two officials of the NAACP Inc. Fund, a natural source on the opposing side.
Clearly this ranking doesn't gauge the quality of the journalism, from most to least or vice versa. It simply illustrates there's more than one way to explain the law as it's made.
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Posted at 09:16 AM
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| HP's plumbers ride again |
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| Fortune |
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| Fri, June 29, 2007 |
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Roger Parloff reports that his Fortune colleague, Nick Varchaver, touched off a battle over an alleged violation of a court secrecy order by using a leaked e-mail in a recent story about Hewlett Packard. Exploring what Varchaver called "a bitter and bizarre lawsuit" and "a story of intrigue, duplicity, and vindictive rage inside one of the world's largest and most respected corporations," his story in the June 11 issue digs into the revelations in a lawsuit between HP and a former executive in HP's flat-panel TV business. HP already had shown it was gunshy about negative press -- understandable, as the suit dredges up corporate espionage claims reminiscent of HP's recent corporate-spying scandal -- by winning a court order sealing some of the records in the case. So when Varchaver got his hands on a particularly juicy e-mail, HP launched a leak investigation (it's famous for those). Varchaver hasn't been subpoenaed, nor would he comment on the fallout from his story, Parloff writes.
How did Varchaver get access to evidence that HP claims was under a court-imposed seal? In his story he attributes his cites "an examination of 1,500 pages of court filings, exhibits, e-mails, and hearing transcripts, along with interviews with 20 lawyers or participants in Kamb's saga," and specifies one source of e-mails that HP thought it had kept hidden: "Fortune obtained [the e-mails] from the public federal court database in the days before they were sealed by the judge." Oops! The offending e-mail, however, appears in the story without any stated source. Now HP is putting opposing lawyers on the spot, seeking pledges that they weren't Varchaver's source. The judge, in Tyler, Texas, could slow down this train. Or not. Either way, HP proves the point of Varchaver's story: Its attack on a former employee has yielded more trouble than it's worth.
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Posted at 05:05 PM
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| Gitmo central |
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| SCOTUSblog |
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| Sat, June 30, 2007 |
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Within two hours of the Supreme Court's remarkable turnabout in the litigation over Guantanamo detainees, Lyle Denniston had posted this detailed analysis and Jason Harrow posted this list of links to related pleadings and previous decisions, continuing SCOTUSblog's winning streak in the coverage of war powers and detainee rights. Too bad there's no index to all of Denniston's coverage of this topic (I thought there once was a topical archive at the site, but now I can't find it).
SCOTUSblog is one of the few blogs I cover on a regular basis because it features on-the-ground reporting, not just commentary based on others' reporting.
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Posted at 07:07 AM
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