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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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| Good questions reveal fake-cop scam |
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| Gasconade County Republican |
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| Tue, July 01, 2008 |
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Linda Trest wins the award for skeptical reporter of the month. The 51-year-old reporter for the weekly Gasconade County Republican in Missouri has given various explanations for what started her reporting that led to revelations that the police in Gerald, Missouri, had been duped by a man posing as a federal agent and leading local cops on warrantless raids. Among the explanations offered: that she was following up on concerned residents had voiced about the leader of the raids, "Sergeant" Bill Jakob; that she became curious when she heard that the secretive "agent," who wouldn't give his name to her or others, had told people that he worked for both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Marshals Service; and finally, as she told Fox News last week, "I was already suspicious of the police department and had been watching them very carefully, so this really raised a lot of red flags." Those suspicions led to a pair of stories in her paper on May 14 (here and here), resulting in the firing of the police chief, civil rights lawsuits by residents who were "arrested" in the bogus raids, and a criminal investigation that so far has not yielded any charges against Jakob or others. Whatever sparked Trest's reporting, it's yielded fame, in the form of Monica Davey's front-pager in today's New York Times, which followed this AP report by Alan Scher Zagier and the Fox interview by a week. Davey's story contains an angle that's ignored in the other reporters, including Trest's, and it puts an ironic and sad coda on the story, assuming it's true: The allegedly bogus raids focused on the areas thriving meth trade, which briefly went into a slump with all of the police activity.
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Posted at 07:45 AM
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| Greenburg takes politics detour |
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| ABC News |
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| Tue, July 01, 2008 |
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ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg reveals on her Legalities blog that her bosses have reassigned her this summer, now that the Supremes are on break. She'll spend the next four months covering the candidates for vice president. "It’s not as big a transition as you might think," Greenburg cheerfully argues, as she points out the prominence of legal issues and potential Supreme Court nominations in the presidential campaign. While I agree it's a plus to have such a law-savvy reporter cover those issues from the trail, it's too bad that ABC evidently lacks the bodies to staff its politics and law beats fully.
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Posted at 08:52 AM
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| Greenhouse and Fidell's last laugh |
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| The New York Times |
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| Wed, July 02, 2008 |
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Linda Greenhouse has taken heat for her husband's legal expertise in military law -- specifically for his advocacy in causes that have come before the Court. But on today's front page, barely two weeks before her retirement, Greenhouse nails a good story thanks to that familial connection.
Over the weekend, Greenhouse says in an e-mail, her husband, Eugene Fidell, spotted a blog post that claimed the Supreme Court's majority decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana erred when it tallied how many jurisdictions have statutes that would punish the rape of a child with the death penalty. The tally, in Justice Anthony Kennedy's controversial majority opinion, left out military law. Dwight Sullivan, a civilian appellate defense counsel in the Air Force Appellate Defense Division, noticed the omission. Sullivan blogged on Saturday night at his CAAFlog blog that in 2006, Congress revised the Uniform Code of Military Justice to punish child-rape with death. The title of his brief but authoritative post says it all: "The Supremes dis the military justice system." Greenhouse wrote in an e-mail, in response to my questions about the origin of the story, that she and Fidell had different takes on what to do with the information:
His instinct as a lawyer was to bring the information to the attention of the Louisiana attorney general's office. My instinct was that it was a great story. I won.
Well, they both won, since the Louisiana AG surely can't miss an above-the-fold front-pager that says a key factual underpinning in a close decision that went against his client was in error -- and hadn't been found by any of the parties or amici that briefed the case (or by any of the reporters who covered it). As for Sullivan, his serious, substantive blog gets some deserved notoriety -- and even a rare link from the text of a Times story (rather than just linking from sidebar material).
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Posted at 08:10 AM
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| Relentless K.C. reporter finally gets results |
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| Kansas City Star |
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| Wed, July 02, 2008 |
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The Kansas City Star's Mike McGraw (pictured here) has to feel a sense of accomplishment today. His extensive, documents-intensive investigation of a major arson case has finally yielded a decision by federal authorities to call for an investigation of his findings. Starting in February 2007 -- after months of reporting already -- McGraw has hammered away at apparent holes in the convictions and life sentences of five defendants convicted in the deaths 20 years ago of six firefighters in a massive explosion. Even though McGraw's earlier reports unearthed serious factual questions about the evidence against the defendants, it wasn't until his story this past Sunday -- in which he added to those questions, most notably with key witnesses recanting -- that McGraw convinced authorities to reopen the case with a fresh set of eyes, a development that the Pulitzer-winning McGraw reports on today.
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Posted at 09:08 AM
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| CAAFlogger adds a p.s. to Kennedy story |
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| Thu, July 03, 2008 |
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A followup to my post yesterday on the origins of Linda Greenhouse's much-talked-about story on the gap in legal research in the Supreme Court's Kennedy v. Louisiana decision. I asked the blogger whose post tipped off Greenhouse, Dwight Sullivan, how obscure this information was in his legal world. He responded by e-mail:
Any serious military justice practitioner would know of the legislation because it was a systemic rewrite of military law governing sexual assaults.
Evidently there were no serious military justice practitioners in the house when this important case was briefed, argued, and decided -- or in the Department of Justice, which yesterday admitted blame for not knowing enough to keep the Court informed, as Greenhouse reports today (and prompting a citation-riddled response by the dogged Sullivan).
Finally, I asked about the name of his blog, CAAFlog:
"CAAF" is the abbreviation for the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, so "CAAFlog" is both an homage to SCOTUSblog and a bit of fun word play, since the "F" that ends CAAF also starts the word "Flog." (We military justice practitioners are apparently easily amused.)
My guess is that CAAFlog is now on a number of blogrolls and RSS readers after this week's revelations.
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Posted at 06:21 AM
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| Sympathetic portrait of an accused plagiarist |
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| The New York Times |
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| Fri, July 04, 2008 |
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Attention, flacks -- er, PR professionals. Any time a client under fire for ethics violations wonders whether to cooperate with a reporter who's digging into the facts and profiling your client, show him this piece today by Adam Liptak. It should help both of you resist the urge to hunker down. That's because the subject, George Mason University law professor Michael O'Neill, comes off looking as good as he might hope under difficult and delicate circumstances. O'Neill, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chief counsel who played a key role in past Supreme Court confirmations, is himself now a nominee to the federal district bench. As Liptak explains, O'Neill also has been under fire for some time for copying other scholars' words and using them as his own in legal papers. Many friends and skeptics have their say in the story. Most importantly, so does O'Neill, who early in the article portrays the copying as the result of a “a poor work method.” He does his explaining from his dining room table at home, rather than from a lawyer's sterile conference room, where he impresses Liptak as "a boyish 46-year-old who wore jeans and a wrinkled blue button-down shirt." The friends' descriptions seem to carry the most punch in the story. Their verdict on O'Neill, as summarized by Liptak: "a creative, fair and exceptionally able lawyer." Liptak ends on this sympathetic note:
Asked how he would have viewed a judicial nominee like himself in his old job on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. O’Neill answered elliptically. “I’ve tried to have a decent reputation with people,” he said. “It’s certainly my fault. You’d like to be not just defined by the mistakes that you make in life.”
I'm not suggesting that Liptak did a puff piece. I find it well-reported and well-rounded, even though I would have liked to know more about the status of O'Neill's nomination; the politics of it (his own ideological pedigree, and how he might fare with Judiciary Committee and Senate Democrats); O'Neill's legal expertise (what topics his scholarship focused on); and a little more wrestling with the word that goes unsaid in the article -- plagiarism -- and what would constitute it under these circumstances. As is, though, the article should satisfy O'Neill and his handlers that it was a wise move to speak to a reporter -- or at least to speak to a reporter as humane as Liptak.
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Posted at 07:21 AM
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| WaPo immigration-law trend story misses mark |
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| Washington Post |
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| Mon, July 07, 2008 |
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Karen Bruillard and her editors at the Washington Post should have taken a closer look at this trend story today, to avoid the trap that they have fallen into. It's a familiar trap for journalists who suspect their story is true and timely, but they either lack the energy or the luck to prove it convincingly. Here's Bruillard's nut graf on what the headline claims is a "rush" by law students to handle immigration cases:
A subject that three decades ago was a secondary, technical field delegated to adjunct professors is booming at law schools nationwide. Elective immigration law courses taught by tenured specialists are filling lecture halls, immigration clinics are expanding and student groups devoted to the subject are mushrooming.
The problems begin with the phrase "three decades ago." Nowhere does the story return to that point of reference. The story is slightly more successful at providing anecdotes that support the notion that there's a boom. But Bruillard's evidence to support the claims in the second sentence -- about who's teaching the classes, how many take them, and the growth of immigration clinics and student groups -- is sketchy at best, and sometimes (in the case of who's teaching the classes) never mentioned again. Part of the problem, which Bruillard mentions three grafs after the nut, is that "there are no statistics on the number studying immigration law." Assuming that is true no matter how hard a reporter worked it, that should not automatically nix the story. Where, after all, would we journalists be if we took an all-or-nothing approach to stories that can't be nailed down with scientific certainty but have ample evidence to suggest they are true? The trouble with this immigration law story, though, is that the evidence falls short of ample.
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Posted at 08:30 AM
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| Same-sex marriage analysis skips the law |
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| MSNBC.com |
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| Tue, July 08, 2008 |
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Tom Curry, MSNBC.com's national affairs writer, contributes to a weekly series called "Briefing Book: Issues '08" in the site's politics section with this piece on the courts and same-sex marriage. I'm not a big fan of the briefing-book format -- no named sources, no he-said/she-said debate of the experts -- but it's a pretty straight (pun!) account of where the two major-party presidential candidates stand on the issue, and what role the courts have played at the state and federal level thus far. My main beef with it (beyond the fact that when I looked at it, the article badly needed a copy-edit): In his effort to explain the law to a lay audience, Curry goes overboard in avoiding messy, technical descriptions of exactly what constitutional provisions the courts have interpreted when holding that same-sex marriage is or isn't constitutionally protected. Readers simply must buy the notion that a court found "the constitution" protects it or doesn't, and that "the constitution" conflicts with a statute or it doesn't. I don't blame citizens for distrusting courts as arbitrary, all-powerful actors in public affairs, considering that even when news organizations make the laudable decision to wrestle with legal/political issues, they often dumb down the legal substance so far that constitutional interpretations sound like mere policy preferences. (Via How Appealing)
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Posted at 06:27 AM
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| Can "narrowcasting" change the cameras debate? |
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| The American Lawyer |
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| Tue, July 08, 2008 |
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Andrew Longstreth reports on The American Lawyer's Litigation Daily blog that longtime cameras-in-the-courts champion Jonathan Sherman is trying to open a federal courtroom to video cameras. The showdown will be decided by tomorrow, when Boston federal district judge Nancy Gertner is scheduled to hear a motion to dismiss the race-discrimination lawsuits against subprime-mortgage provider Countrywide Bank. What gives Sherman, a Boies, Schiller & Flexner partner, the notion that camera access in federal trial courts is an open question? Longstreth's story, and the briefs by both sides that AmLaw posted here and here, explain.
First, Sherman argues that the Judicial Conference of the United States' opposition to cameras in trial courts doesn't necessarily trump a local rule. And the district's local rule gives a judge wiggle room on the cameras question. Next, Sherman tries to undercut all the usual arguments by noting that his client, Courtroom View Network, wants to record an entire hearing (no sound bites!) featuring legal arguments only (no witness or juror intimidation). Perhaps the most intriguing argument by Sherman is that the recording will be "narrowcast" by CVN, thus countering concerns of mass-media sensationalism. He writes in his brief:
The Internet provides a forum for newsgathering entities such as CVN to cover cases of less interest to the general public -- by definition, presenting less risk of sensationalism -- but much more interest to constituents that have uniquely particularized stakes in the proceedings, and which seek accurate and complete information about court proceedings. The Internet acts as a virtual overflow room, making feasible a business model that can reach these sorts of stakeholders -- for example, financial journalists, Wall Street analysts, members of the legal profession, plaintiffs in MDL proceedings, and, as here, putative class members -- but without the risks that traditional media coverage is thought by some to pose to the dignity and operation of courts.
CVN's audience varies according to the case that it covers -- sometimes only the participants in that case, sometimes a broader but limited legal audience (in partnership with AmLaw's parent ALM, which the story might have noted). No matter what, though, it's for subscribers only. Elsewhere in the brief, Sherman again distances his client from traditional televised journalism:
. . . [O]ur message here is principally that CVN is not television and does not provide television coverage. It is part of a new form of information gathering—using the Internet in effect to expand the traditional notion of the overflow room to persons unwilling or unable to travel or get to the courtroom but whose interest in the proceeding—the entire proceeding—is professional or educational rather than related to “entertainment.”
Countrywide's lawyers from Goodwin Procter responded forcefully, calling the request unprecedented and tarring CVN with profit-minded motives:
There is no "public interest" here, and CVN's commercial advancement and that of its analyst client base is no reason to undo this District's long-standing policy against courtroom cameras.
Regardless of how the judge rules, it's clear to me that this set of arguments by CVN could do the trick eventually to crack federal courts' obstinance on cameras. Do I wish the media didn't have to make such arguments in the first place -- essentially slamming popular media to win the day? Of course, and I'm sure Sherman (whom I know from his days at Cahill Gordon, representing Court TV) would agree. But whatever it takes to break down those walls, I say go for it.
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Posted at 12:17 PM
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| Times vows to fill legal slot . . . eventually |
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| The New York Times |
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| Tue, July 08, 2008 |
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Nine Tuesdays ago, Adam Liptak's Sidebar column on legal affairs in the Times ran with this note:
Beginning next week, the Sidebar column will be on hiatus for a few months. It will resume after Adam Liptak begins coverage of the Supreme Court later this year.
Since then, the Times has said nothing publicly (that I'm aware of) about its plans to fill Liptak's vacancy on the national desk's New York-based legal affairs beat -- a vacancy it has known about since at least early April, when it picked Liptak to replace Linda Greenhouse. Where I come from, lengthy vacancies and publication hiatuses -- especially when the cause of the vacancy was a veteran staffer taking a buyout -- spell trouble in one of two forms: a hiring freeze or a position on the chopping block. A third option, I suppose, is a drastically rethought beat. I asked the Times and Liptak for an update. A PR person did nothing to dampen my speculation that a treasured legal affairs beat -- one unburdened with daily courthouse obligations and previously staffed with distinction by William Glaberson and David Margolick -- was in danger. "At this time no decisions have been made," was all she'd say. But, via Liptak, Times editors are more reassuring, telling him, he says, that he "will definitely be replaced, but personnel decisions take a little longer than they used to, for obvious reasons."
I'll buy that, but I promise to stomp my little blogger feet in frustration if it turns out that the Times budget gods yank away the money before it can be spent. Meantime, Liptak is doing more than packing his family for the move to D.C. He promises "a couple more articles" in his fabulous American Exception series before the first Monday in October.
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Posted at 01:25 PM
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| Nichols trial coverage weak on insanity defense |
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| Atlanta Journal-Constitution |
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| Thu, July 10, 2008 |
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Few criminal cases have received as much attention in Atlanta lately -- and deservedly so -- as the Brian Nichols case. Nichols is charged with capital murder in the deaths three years ago of four court and law enforcement officials in a wild courthouse shootout and escape. Now that Nichols is on trial and pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, you'd think that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would do back flips to inform its readers on all the ins and outs of this always-controversial and easily misunderstood issue, especially in such an important and emotional case. But you'd be wrong. The AJC's coverage so far suffers from a lack of imagination bordering on irresponsibility. Today's story by Steve Visser, marking the official debut of Nichols' insanity defense, touches on the critical issues, but only barely. Here's how Visser's story handles it:
Nichols contends he couldn't control his actions on March 11, 2005, when he is accused of fatally shooting a judge, a court reporter, a sheriff's deputy and a federal officer. He suffered from a delusional compulsion that "overmastered his will," according to court papers filed Wednesday.
If Nichols is found insane at the time of the killings, he would be sent to a secure mental hospital to be evaluated and kept there until he was determined not to be threat to himself or others, said Thomas West, a lawyer and expert in capital-murder defense who is not involved in this case.
"If the doctors find that he is OK, they can make a report that he should be released but there would have to be a hearing before a judge," West said. "The court has to determine if he can be released."
West said success in using an insanity defense is "rare" since a jury found John Hinckley was not guilty by reason of insanity in the assassination attempt of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
One local expert? Four short grafs? That's it? There's so much more the paper could do to explain to readers the debate among legal and psychiatric experts over criminal responsibility and the legal standards for insanity, and what happens to a defendant who is acquitted on those grounds. The story mentions the obvious (and overused) Hinckley precedent, but nothing else about how often the defense is used and how the laws have changed over the years. I dug into the AJC's archives to see if the paper had already tackled the issue in depth, and found only this story last month by Jeffry Scott, which is similarly cursory in its treatment of an issue sure to dominate coffee-table and barroom debates in Atlanta. Wouldn't the paper truly fulfill its duty by informing that debate with in-depth, factual coverage?
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Posted at 11:19 AM
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| 2 legal journos join new UC law school |
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| Thu, July 10, 2008 |
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Erwin Chemerinsky, the founding dean of the new School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, has hired two prominent legal journalists as part of his inaugural team of faculty and administrators. Former longtime LA Times legal writer Henry Weinstein, who took a buyout from the paper recently, will teach in both literary journalism and law. And Rex Bossert is leaving the top editor's position at the National Law Journal to be the law school's director of communications and public affairs. This press release has the full list of new hires. (Via NLJ's L.A. Legal Pad)
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Posted at 12:48 PM
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| Useful, if slightly stale, report on terror probes |
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| National Public Radio |
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| Fri, July 11, 2008 |
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Ari Shapiro's report on today's Morning Edition gets its numbers on the simultaneous decline of terrorism prosecutions and increase in terror-investigation wiretaps from administration critics Human Rights First. But, if anything, the administration's views on why intelligence gathering has eclipsed law enforcement priorities are voiced more clearly and forcefully through Shapiro's sources. So the right's usual slam against NPR for liberal bias should fall flat in this instance. The harder question is whether Shapiro is guilty of hyping a story that's not news. His first quoted source, a former prosecutor, touts the "quiet revolution" taking place as law enforcement priorities shift to intelligence gathering. As other sources point out, as does Shapiro himself (including in the unusually extensive text version of the story), there's nothing quiet or new about this post-9/11 revolution. It's been heavily documented by journalists, authors, and scholars for years, including by our sister organization at Syracuse University, TRAC. Shapiro could have tried harder to find the latest twist in the story. But his intelligent storytelling and authoritative sourcing still provide a useful reminder to listeners that the government's policies are in flux and under debate.
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Posted at 01:23 PM
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| Classic WSJ narrative on "Law and Order" battle |
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| The Wall Street Journal |
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| Sat, July 12, 2008 |
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Rebecca Dana weaves a marvelously rich narrative on the front of today's Wall Street Journal about the legal battles between NBC and Dick Wolf, producer of the network's cash cow, "Law and Order." Dana breezes through the parties' long, troubled history and intelligently places the conflict in a broader regulatory context: the end of the rules more than a decade ago that separated production of TV content from its distribution. I love the understated, ironic kicker:
The original "Law and Order" celebrated a milestone earlier this year: 400 episodes on the air. NBC Universal executives wanted to host a small party for the cast and crew. Mr. Wolf proposed instead an expensive soirée at Cipriani in New York with every actor who has ever appeared on the series in attendance. The two sides were not able to come to an agreement and the anniversary passed quietly without celebration.
But I thought this line in Dana's third graf -- "If it were a TV show, it would be called 'Law and Order: Law and Order'" -- was unfortunate.
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Posted at 08:07 AM
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| Gertner on media: A call for cameras |
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| Legal Talk Network |
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| Sat, July 12, 2008 |
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Massachusetts federal district judge Nancy Gertner makes some thoughtful comments on judges' interactions with the public, and with journalists, in this half-hour interview on Legal Talk Network by hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams. She ends it with a provocative statement, amid a discussion of what judges can do to improve public understanding of the law and courts. "In time, maybe, we'll one day have cameras in the courtroom, if I have anything to do with it," Gertner says. "Courts should be much more accessible to everyone in a way that they've never been before." That's especially noteworthy, given that Gertner is considering ruling on a petition to open her courtroom to cameras, as I blogged about here. (Evidently Gertner has not yet ruled on whether to allow Courtroom View Network's camera.)
Leading up to that zinger was a lively discussion on the quality of news coverage of the courts, distinguishing quality reporting from unreliable rumor, and the need for judges to play a more prominent role in countering criticism of the courts and teaching people what judges actually do. The first question of the interview touches on Gertner's role as a blogger at Slate's Convictions blog -- she was invited to contribute there by her former student Emily Bazelon, now Slate's legal editor -- but it's a quick discussion (about how blogging "didn't seem to be a great leap" from her role as frequent op-ed writer and teacher) that only alludes to her relative inactivity as a Convictions contributor (only a handful of times, and not once since late April, if Slate's search tool is to be believed). But at the 10 and a half minute mark, Ambrogi begins a series of questions that continually pulls the conversation back to judges' public roles. Current rules limiting judges' public comments are too narrow, Gertner says, as she applauds efforts by the American Bar Association and various state bars to unleash judges. "I think that that is so important," Gertner says, adding a moment later, "I'm appalled by the way our profession and judges in particular are talked about on the media." The key problem now, Gertner says, concerns the strict limits on judicial comment when particular decisions are criticized:
I think that that has to change. It has to change in a way that is consistent with being a judge. In other words, I'm not suggesting that we all appear on "The O'Reilly Factor." There has to be a way of responding.
Why doesn't she blog more? Gertner hints that it isn't just because she's busy, though that is a factor. It's also, she says, because the conversation at Convictions can be awfully pointed in analyzing Supreme Court decisions. So Gertner believes in drawing lines on public commentary, but it's good to hear a judge who believes in drawing that line further out than it is now. And it's especially good to know that she is open to a discussion about cameras in a federal court.
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Posted at 01:07 PM
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| Greenhouse retrospectives, Parts I and II |
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| Sat, July 12, 2008 |
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Hours after appearing on NPR's Weekend edition for a Q&A with host Linda Wertheimer to talk about her career and where the Supreme Court seems to be headed, Linda Greenouse has published a personal remembrance of her 30 years covering the Court for The New York Times. It appears in tomorrow's Week in Review section, less than a week before Greenhouse's last official day before retiring and heading to Yale Law School to teach. Greenhouse's comments on NPR and in the paper focus more on the Court than on her -- properly so -- but here's one of the more original and telling passages:
[N]othing touched me as much as the arrival in September 1981 of Sandra Day O’Connor. I had never heard her name before President Ronald Reagan nominated her that summer to succeed Potter Stewart. Although I covered her confirmation hearing, she remained to me basically a blank slate. That didn’t matter. The first time I looked up from the press section and saw a woman sitting on the bench, I was thrilled in a way I would never have predicted. Her presence invaded my subconscious. I had recurring dreams about her. In one, she asked me my opinion on a pending case (something no justice ever did in real life). But mostly, she just had walk-on roles in ordinary nighttime dramas, her presence signifying what it meant to me to know that there was no longer a position in the legal profession that a woman could not aspire to.
The piece makes a number of powerful statements about the Court's role in our democracy, though practically none about the role of the press in interpreting the Court -- or about her own role, other than having been there a long time. That's both modest and appropriate, but it leaves for another day an independent assessment of what Greenhouse's tenure has meant for legal journalism.
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Posted at 01:34 PM
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| Levy series critics ask "who cares?" |
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| The Washington Post |
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| Tue, July 15, 2008 |
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Is the Washington Post series "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" sensationalism and exploitation, or solid journalism? Put another way, can there be real news value in the story of a single unsolved murder? Or is it transparently cheesy to select for such prominent treatment the story of a pretty, young victim involved in an illicit affair with a married congressman, in a case that was full of media hype until it was forgotten post-9/11? That's the debate raging on the message board attached to the series' reporters' notebook. Three of 13 parts of this serial have been published so far, and several readers have posted comments questioning the motives of the Post and its reporters (Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham, and Sylvia Moreno). A sampling:
This feels like an episode of the Wire where the reporters chase a nonstory in search of a Pulitzer while the real news in the city goes unreported. I guess the corporate puppet masters wanted to break last year's record. You cannot justify this amount of resources on the death of one person, under the guise that you're looking at the investigation. A broader examination of the high number of unsolved murders in the city or region, or the recent rise in murders would have made more sense. I'm glad that the reporters had an opportunity to indulge their personal interests but you have done a disservice to the residents of this region.
Posted by: Tina | July 14, 2008 8:28 AM
Young,not too attractive, Jewish girl with Ciao suitcases, Dupont circle address and penchant for married men disappears and is found murdered. Is it worthy of this much attention? May involve a congressman! Nothing really unusual when considering those people. Please try journalism as a vehicle for freedom of the press rather than Murdoch-like forays into sensationalism.
Posted by: bona fide | July 13, 2008 3:44 PM
I look to the Washington Post for current vital news coverage. Although an interesting read, making this story front page on Sunday was a tacky ploy to sell papers. Leave sensationalism and mystery to the "rags".
Posted by: Linda S. | July 14, 2008 10:57 AM
Put aside the racism of the comment by "bona fide" (and ignore much of the other rubbish on the message board, so typical of the wisdom of the crowd on news sites). And what you have here are genuine objections to the notion that one murder deserves so much more attention than any other. And genuine skepticism that the Post's rationale for revisiting the case -- examining the mistakes of investigators -- is anything other than a cover for sexploitation.
I disagree with those readers, and I'm enjoying the serial so far. By looking back at the case, the Post team aims to show "how many of the details that were originally reported about this case were wrong," and why police and media bumbling and bias may have helped the real murderer escape justice. I like how the Post is telling the story, in easily digestible two-take installments rather than in our typical mass-of-gray copy blobs that scream Important Project. As the story unfolds, I have the natural reaction when one is following a serial: I can't wait for the next part.
More to my point, I consider the questions explored by the series to be newsworthy and deserving of such attention. We need to know if our original suspicions of Rep. Gary Condit were unfair and wrong. We need to know if a major metropolitan police department screwed up an important case -- and how such screwups occur. By definition, news is selective: It's what is new and unusual. And, when told in story form by professional reporters and writers, it should be engaging and gripping and dramatic and, yes, sensational (in the best sense of the word).
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Posted at 12:54 PM
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| Is Mukasey a reporter's best friend at DOJ? |
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| The New York Sun |
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| Thu, July 17, 2008 |
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Intriguing hints in this New York Sun story by Josh Gerstein that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has set the bar higher for prosecutors seeking to question journalists about sources. The story's a bit confusing, and the hints come at the end of the piece. But what it adds up to, evidently, is a glimpse of an internal debate over tactics affecting shield-law-lacking journalists in Mukasey's DOJ -- with the AG vetoing more aggressive tactics. The reporter in the hot seat is the Washington Times' William Gertz. Let's hope that more filings and on-site reporting reveal more about what's going on. (Via How Appealing)
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Posted at 02:12 PM
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| Above the Law's next move |
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| Blog of Legal Times |
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| Fri, July 18, 2008 |
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Legal Times' blog reports that Above the Law's David Lat is getting a promotion. He's moving from D.C. to NYC to take a broader role at ATL's parent company, Breaking Media. He tells BLT he'll still write for the law-gossip blog, but he's in the market for a writer whose interest and location may take the blog in new directions.
Let's hope so. The direction I recommend is called "reporting." I like Lat and sometimes find his writing amusing, even occasionally informative. But he breaks very little actual news. Mostly he does that blogger thing of feeding off real news organizations. And when he does pretend to report, it's often the weakest form of the art: repeating rumors without checking them out, as I noted here, here, and here. I even fantasized about firing him for it here. He brags about the lack of standards on his admittedly robust reader comments. And he's taken to running advertorial posts. Yuck. It all adds up to a missed opportunity. He has the youth vote. He's squandered it so far on pranks and lame, superficial fact gathering. Let's hope he hires someone who will actually dig up original stories of the solid, checked variety.
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Posted at 07:01 AM
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| Greenhouse reader chat winds down |
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| The New York Times |
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| Fri, July 18, 2008 |
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Today Linda Greenhouse is wrapping up her turn in the "Talk to the Newsroom" feature, and 40 years at the Times. The Q&A with readers throughout the week has been mildly interesting, but not remotely as memorable as her Week in Review story last Sunday, which I blogged about here -- and which evidently will stand as her last byline in the paper, at least while on staff.
Update: Perhaps I spoke too soon? Talk about poignant endings. Here's how this most famous beat reporter ended her weeklong engagement with readers -- real readers, not just the cranks and chattering classes we normally hear from. There's hope that people actually care about what journalists cover:
A Personal Note Since
this is my last day at The Times, I'll add a personal word. I'm told
the Web site has received more than 600 e-mail messages for the column
this week. I've received many addressed to me personally. Obviously, I
couldn't respond to all of them. But they have opened a window for me
on this newspaper's readership. I have been struck and touched by how
passionately engaged so many readers are with the ongoing story of the
United States Supreme Court, the story I have spent the past 30 years
trying to tell. I feel very lucky. You are the readers I always liked
to imagine that I had.
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Posted at 12:13 PM
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| Heading for the (bigger) hills |
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| Fri, July 18, 2008 |
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One of the little-known facts about LawBeat is that world headquarters is a log home, nestled in the woods several hundred yards off the road, in New York's lovely Finger Lakes region. If blogging actually paid the bills, it would be a pretty sweet gig. So why, you ask, do I need a vacation? In another woods-nestled log cabin, no less? Because the one that Mrs. LawBeat and I are going to is several miles off road, in the Adirondack High Peaks region. The view from the front "yard" (shown here) isn't bad. Better yet, there's no Internet. Not even electricity. Now that's a sweet gig, at least for a restful week.
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Posted at 12:17 PM
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| Recommended reading: Lane and Hajdu |
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| Mon, July 28, 2008 |
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I'm back from the mountains: tanned, rested, and ready. Thank goodness I already was tanned before leaving, considering the amount of rain northern New York saw during my week there. But it was a good, unplugged getaway. Before I plunge back in to blogging and real work, a couple of plugs for the two books of legal history by journalist authors that I read when I wasn't hiking or snoozing:
Chuck Lane's reason for leaving the Washington Post's Supreme Court beat -- upon his return from book leave he moved to the editorial pages -- was well worth it. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction is moving, enraging, and essential reading for anyone interested in civil rights history. Lane pulled at a thread that he noticed while reporting on the beat, and out came this tale of a horrific crime and its aftermath, resulting in one of the Court's most infamous opinions. It's a great read. One question that it never really seems to answer, though, is whether the Court's ruling in the Colfax Massacre case was legally incorrect, and not just tragically wrong in political terms.
My former Newhouse School colleague David Hajdu's book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, is more social than legal history. But it's a gem of First Amendment lore that has been largely overlooked in recent decades. I'm in awe of Hajdu's deep reporting and research, and the narrative that it yields, thanks to his talents.
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Posted at 07:02 AM
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| Playing catch-up with legal-reporting news |
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| Mon, July 28, 2008 |
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A few brief updates on previously blogged stories that advanced while I was away:
- The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein travels to California to cover the hearing that he wrote about earlier involving a leak investigation and Washington Times reporter William Gertz (here's my earlier post on his reporting, plus a folo he did). Turns out that AG Mukasey isn't journalists' white knight after all, though it's a bit speculative (Gerstein writes that "it would appear" that Mukasey has authorized a grand jury subpoena for Gertz). Kudos to Gerstein and the Sun for covering yet another legal assault on independent legal reporting in the shield-less federal courts.
- One of the nation's most experienced and accomplished legal reporters, the Chicago Tribune's Maurice Possley, took a buyout and left with some depressingly frank talk about the probable fate of enterprising public-service journalism. Romenesko posted Possley's goodbye memo lamenting the gutting of his great paper. And NPR Day to Day's Alex Chadwick interviewed Possley afterward, where he decried the "flow of institutional memory" out the door in successive waves of layoffs. Possley reported and wrote (as part of a team usually) many of the Trib's groundbreaking reports on wrongful convictions and prosecutorial misconduct.
- Steve Fromm is the new National Law Journal editor in chief, replacing Rex Bossert. Good to see a deserving veteran work his way up to the top job at that weekly. The NLJ is owned by Incisive Media, the new and awfully generic-sounding name for American Lawyer Media. Maybe the name sounds better when uttered in a British accent.
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Posted at 07:13 AM
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| WaPo tries an old trick, and succeeds |
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| Washington Post |
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| Mon, July 28, 2008 |
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There's been much chatter about the Washington Post series "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" Much of that chatter has been on the Post's own site, including the comments attached to a running Reporters' Notebook and in a live chat today with series editor Jeff Leen and reporters Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham, and Sylvia Moreno. Yesterday, the paper's ombudsman chattered about the chatter. (Now, I guess, I'm chattering about the chatter about the chatter.)
It's a healthy debate, but enough already! What the Post has done, quite simply, is tell a story. It told it well. Those who cared to read it were informed and entertained for 12 consecutive days. And, when the story reached its conclusion, readers who stuck with it knew much more about the Levy case than they had before, even if they had been rabid fans of the story in its pre-9/11 heyday.
Complaints about the series fall into two major camps. The first camp gripes that focusing so much on the Levy case, so prominently (the series ran exclusively on the front page and got a lot of acreage at washingtonpost.com), was tabloid journalism, racist, and all manner of other sins. They say this because, fundamentally, they weren't interested enough in the series to consider it important and they whine about how many stories the paper could have covered instead. You know what? It's a free country. Read or watch something else while the rest of us get informed and enjoy a good story.
The second camp gripes that the series buried the lede. This one's a closer call. Post ombudsman Howell weighed in with this camp when she wrote:
The series was well reported and written, and it nailed police incompetence in stories of accessible length. But, to me, the project wasn't worth 13 days, all on Page 1, and the new information wasn't highlighted sufficiently so that readers, especially the ones who had followed the story earlier, could easily tell what had not been reported before. It was simply too much for this impatient, time-starved reader who wanted to know what the reporters found out right way.
To Leen, that "would have ruined the suspense and defeated the entire purpose of our attempt to find a new form of storytelling. We strongly feel that the reader needs to experience the story as it happened in real time to understand how and why the investigation went awry."
He's right about that, but the suspense might have held even if the first piece had better foreshadowed the major findings and readers had been told in a box what was new each day. Many of the pieces could have run inside the paper, with a Page 1 key, or only on the Web.
In the Q&A today, Leen wrote: "we wanted to try to tell the story as a serial narrative in real time, unfolding as it happened through the eyes of the investigators and the investigated." They succeeded. It read much like a book, or like the serial that it was -- a trick learned long ago by magazines and newspapers that were happy to feed the hunger for a good yarn. I appreciated the digestible size of each day's installment (two normal-length takes on the Web). And, even though the writing eschewed convention, it contained news. Yesterday's Reporters' Notebook entry helpfully summarized the key findings of the series, which is an impressive list. Is it buried, and published too late to do the inverted-pyramid crowd any good? No and no. The Post deserves praise for resisting the impulse to do the Important Series in the same old journalistic way. And for breaking news, in this unorthodox way, that really matters -- holding police and pack journalism accountable for making fatal mistakes in 2001-02.
The media-frenzy chapter has useful insights into former Rep. Gary Condit's PR strategy. But, for my money, the most damning details about journalistic sins came in the preceding chapter, where we see how competitive reporters gobbled up police leaks without the necessary skepticism (will we ever learn?). And, for those who want a shorthand summary, Leen provided it in this exchange with a reader today:
What was the point of these articles? What was I supposed to walk away with?
Jeffrey Leen: Police mistakes allowed a killer to go free.
An innocent man has been unfairly convicted in the public mind.
A media frenzy helped derail the investigation.
Everyone thought they knew this story, but they really didn't.
My advice: Invest time in the longer version. It's a good and important read.
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Posted at 05:04 PM
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| Glimpses of Hamdan trial news coverage |
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| Tue, July 29, 2008 |
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Two recent stories from the trial of Guantánamo detainee Salim Hamdan combine to provide a snapshot of the logistics involved in providing coverage of the trial. Yesterday, Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg noted that the majority of reporters who flew in for the start of the trial flew right back out after only two days. In the fifth item of her reporter's notebook, Rosenberg notes that the trial-opening contingent of about three dozen news organizations had dwindled within a couple of days to 11 people: four newspapers, three wire services, one radio reporter and "an audio-video team from This American Life, which came to Guantánamo for gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Hamdan trial."She doesn't ID the four newspapers, but I'd guess they're The New York Times, Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
Then, in today's Times, longtime Guantánamo-justice reporter William Glaberson explains in his "Guantánamo Memo" that "freedom of the press has its limits at Guantánamo": military-run press conferences and escorts to corral reporters; limited and often-delayed release of court documents; and tight control over the closed-circuit video feed to an overflow room, editing out certain faces and details. Glaberson, whose article mainly contrasts the Hamdan trial procedures with an ordinary American criminal trial, ruins one military flack's breakfast with this graf:
When a reporter noted that in America reporters were permitted to see witnesses and evidence, a spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions at the Pentagon, Maj. Gail Crawford, responded, “This is not America.”
Finally, Dahlia Lithwick catalogs quality Guantanamo coverage by journalists and bloggers in this new Slate piece. She branches off from there to cite a number of recent books, some of which (but not all of which) I mentioned here.
Update: I guessed wrong on which four papers were still in the Guantanamo courtroom. Also there is Carol Williams of the LA Times. And I haven't found a recent Wall Street Journal dateline from there. So that's how Rosenberg added up to four: the two Timeses, the Post, and the Herald. Which is surprising, given Jess Bravin's excellent coverage from there for the Journal in the past.
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Posted at 06:22 AM
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| Why not inject legal facts into Scrabulous debate? |
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| The New York Times |
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| Wed, July 30, 2008 |
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This Heather Timmons story in today's Times is about outrage across the Internet, and among Facebook users in particular, over the demise of the game Scrabulous in the face of Hasbro's copyright infringement claims. So would it have killed Timmons and her editors to spend a graf or two explaining what exactly are Hasbro's claims, and whether experts think it's a slam-dunk case? What features of a game can be protected? What are the usual remedies? Does the name Scrabulous itself pose a trademark problem, or is this really all about copyright, as the story seems to imply? Those of us who haven't read the pleadings and scouted out more in-depth treatment of the case -- and who aren't already IP-law aficionados -- are left in the dark. And those who simply want to vent about boycotting Hasbro and about Scrabble's lame technology versus Scrabulous' superior technology are left to vent in a law-free vacuum.
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Posted at 05:59 AM
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| Johnston vs. GE: hardball PR plays out in pleadings |
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| Wed, July 30, 2008 |
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Leave it to David Cay Johnston to turn a tax-law story into a threat-laden tale of hardball corporate PR. The dogged and feisty former New York Times reporter is the talk of the tax-law blogs, and has set General Electric lawyers' hair on fire, with his June 30 report in Tax Analysts' weekly Tax Notes International on allegations of improprieties involving a GE subsidiary in Brazil. The controversy, playing out in GE's legal dispute with a former in-house lawyer whom it accuses of leaking documents to Johnston, has gained momentum with revealing reports and useful links in Corporate Crime Reporter. CCR first reported on the initial Tax Notes International story, then on the leak investigation, and most recently with more details on the alleged whisteblower's case. Most interesting perhaps are GE's boasts that it killed the story when Johnston was still at the Times, and then talked Tax Analysts into removing the story from its Web site within days of its publication. Johnston disputes the first claim -- he says the Times "graciously" allowed him to take the story with him when he retired in April -- and Tax Notes' editor disputes the second, saying that the subscriber-only publication was only following protocol by limiting the story's Web exposure. He points out, correctly, that the story is still easy to find on Lexis-Nexis, which is where I found the report that GE's lawyers called in their pleadings "false, malicious and highly misleading." GE says it's pursuing Johnston's alleged source so hard because her alleged leaks threaten GE's "hard-earned reputation for stellar integrity and governance."
The underlying story itself is, indeed, incendiary. With a spunky title ("Blame it on Rio: GE's Brazilian Headache"), the story is quickly off and running after an anecdotal lede detailing a GE manager's warning three years ago that the company may have engaged in tax evasion. Johnston then estimates what the supposed scheme might have netted -- and what else supposedly was going on in Brazil:
On $ 100 million of sales, that would be an extra $ 12 million to $ 19 million the company could use for all sorts of things, from lowering prices to gain market share, to funneling money to anyone from a corrupt purchasing agent to cronies of powerful politicians, or inflating the pay of its executives and sales agents. All of these issues would come up internally in the months ahead, but would not be disclosed to American or Brazilian authorities or GE shareholders.
Johnston makes no effort to hide his belief in the truth of the allegations, writing:
The tax schemes and subsequent events are detailed in hundreds of pages of internal GE e-mails, memos, and legal opinions obtained by Tax Analysts. A lawyer for a participant in some of the events provided the documents on the condition that the source not be identified. The internal documents offer a rare and candid look at how, behind closed doors, GE executives, managers, and lawyers dealt with evidence of systematic tax cheating that flourished over many years.
The story goes on to question whether GE should have done more to disclose the alleged wrongdoing to shareholders. Other than on the blogs and in Corporate Crime Reporter, the story and ensuing sourcing controversy have attracted surprisingly little attention -- including in the Times. CCR quotes Johnston on his theory of why that is:
“No US news organization, except for the Corporate Crime Reporter, has written about my Tax Notes International article, but Brazilian news organizations have,” Johnston said. “GE has repeatedly tried to muscle me with threats of litigation. And other journalists who have read my piece have told me that GE has threatened litigation against anyone who writes about my article.”
We'll watch for more on the anything-but-retiring Johnston and his tussle with GE.
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Posted at 09:56 AM
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| Mauro's tickler file comes through |
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| Legal Times |
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| Wed, July 30, 2008 |
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Bravo to Tony Mauro for returning one year later to the story of Chief Justice John Roberts' health. Even though his questions go unanswered, Mauro calmly makes the case why it's still news in this post at BLT.
His report also makes me regret the snarky tone I took last year about coverage of the chief's blackout and seizure. Mauro is right. It's news, and Roberts is obligated to be less secretive about it.
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Posted at 11:49 AM
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| Goldsmith vs. Lichtblau: It's payback time |
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| The New Republic |
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| Thu, July 31, 2008 |
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In his book last year, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith recounts a "friendly" introductory chat over coffee he had with The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau. The meeting, requested by Lichtblau, ends with Goldsmith lying to Lichtblau to avoid spilling national security secrets that the reporter asked about -- and then his anger over being subpoenaed to testify in the Justice Department's leak investigation over the Lichtblau-Risen stories. Goldsmith never comes out and says it, but his message is clear: He was sandbagged by that old reporter trick of suckering in a potential source with small talk, and then sneakily coming to the real point of the conversation.
Nearly four years after that uncomfortable face-to-face encounter, Goldsmith has now paid Lichtblau back with a savage review of Lichtblau's book Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice. More precisely, the savagery is directed comprehensively at Lichtblau's body of work at the Times in breaking stories that the administration didn't want told. Oddly, the review is in the new issue of The New Republic, appearing nearly four months after Lichtblau's book was published. Perhaps Goldsmith, who burned some bridges with the administration with his own revelations, was playing it safe and clearing what he would write, as he implies that he is walking up to the line that prevents him from disclosing what he learned with a high-level security clearance.
If Lichtblau harbored the same ill will toward Goldsmith all these years, it didn't show in his book, where he calls Goldsmith "widely admired" and portrays him as a principled player facing off against overly secretive, rule-bending terror warriors in the post-9/11 scramble to tailor American intelligence operations to a new kind of war. The two books seemed of a piece to me when I mentioned them in the context of yet another related book, Ben Wittes' Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. And yet Goldsmith now unloads on Lichtblau for probably committing a crime for his reporting, for endangering American lives -- and, perhaps worst of all in Beltway terms, for displaying "a surprisingly thin-skinned and even self-pitying attitude toward criticism of his work."
Personalities, payback, and politics aside, Goldsmith's bottom line comes out nearly identical to Lichtblau's: criticizing the administration for "genuinely excessive" secrecy and defensiveness. Goldsmith remains true to the themes and principles displayed in his valuable book, but uses the TNR review to explain more about his discomfort with transparent government and an activist press. In the process, he's reminding his admirers on the left and in the press that Bush administration critics come in more than one flavor.
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Posted at 11:57 AM
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| Oliphant cranks up the legal-reporting/blogging heat |
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| Chicago Tribune |
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| Thu, July 31, 2008 |
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Chicago Tribune's law and Supreme Court reporter Jim Oliphant is blogging on his own now, rather than just at the Trib's Swamp blog. The blog is called Writ Large (cute). Prolific and playful (check out his introductory post Infrequently Asked Questions), Oliphant is worth keeping an eye (or an RSS feed) on. Which is easier to do now that the feed is a straight shot of Oliphant, rather than the mix at the Swamp. And he (along with Jan Greenburg and Tony Mauro) have now increased pressure on other SCOTUS beat reporters to get with the blogging program. (And why am I being so parenthetical in this post? I need an editor!)
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Posted at 03:00 PM
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