The Law Reporters: Our conversation with Jan Crawford Greenburg, Adam Liptak, Dahlia Lithwick and Jack Ford
Our conversation on April 9th at the Time Warner Center offered yet another stimulating and fun evening at the Forum. Here are some highlights:
We learned, in advance of the public announcement, that Adam Liptak will soon be taking on Linda Greenhouse’s position as the Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times.
There was much stimulating conversation about what makes the legal system so newsworthy. Our guests agreed that the aside from the legal system at work, there are individual stories of people who are affected by the law, compelling stories with great human interest, and it is these stories, more so than the machinery of justice, that drives the public’s interest in the law. Dahlia Lithwick pointed out that the public is always interested in crime and its relationship to the law, and some of what passes for the public’s appetite for the law is really just a fascination with crime, rather than the decisions in Supreme Court cases.
Jack Ford spoke of his experience in having to bring the law to life in the time span of a sound bite. Jan Crawford Greenburg agreed that it is more difficult as a TV journalist to tell the story of the law in such shortened time segments, and both Jan and Jack longed for the space and freedom to write longer pieces as print journalists. Jan had once been a print journalist, and she lamented the fact that fewer newspapers around the country dedicate a full-time reporter to the coverage of the law, in contrast to TV news coverage, in which legal analysts abound. Jack, however, decried how ill-informed some of these analysts actually are. He also feared that daytime TV courtroom programs, in contrast to TV news coverage, gave the public a false impression of what “real” courtroom judges actually do: “They surely don’t yell and humiliate the parties after a commercial break.”
Dahlia Lithwick felt that the amount of blog activity on the Web, specifically written by judges and law professors, was a healthy sign of the democratization of the law and the ability of legal experts to expand the range of ideas outside the confines of newspaper and print journalism.
Jan Crawford Greenburg, Adam Liptak, and Dahlia Lithwick spoke about the coverage of the Supreme Court, and the way in which the judges themselves insist on maintaining their privacy, which is one of the reasons why the Supreme Court is so mysterious, and why the coverage of the Supreme Court does not include humanizing the individual justices. We simply don’t write about them, or learn about them, as if they are presidential candidates or legislators–even during confirmation hearings. Each of our guests shared stories of the natural limitations involved in the coverage of the Supreme Court; and there was also one funny story of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor being blithely asked by a tourist to snap a picture of her before the Supreme Court building, not realizing that the photographer was actually a justice of the Supreme Court.
Jack Ford spoke about how the public’s knowledge about the law, and the quality of legal judgments, too, would benefit from more cameras in the courtroom. Everyone agreed that the public’s interest in the law dictated the news relevance of the stories, that editors and producers do not force stories onto the public for purely education purposes–hence, Anna Nicole Smith’s case in front of the Supreme Court provided both news relevance and commercial appeal for a public endlessly interested in all things legal, and all things salacious and entertaining, such as a fashion model’s claims under a will contest.
Jack Ford talked about the need to often sell the law, exemplified by on-air legal analysts wearing makeup in filing their stories.
And there was also some lively discussion about the way in which the public believes that they already understand the law from having watched Boston Legal, Michael Clayton, or in reading Scott Turow novels. Jack Ford said that prosecutors all over America find themselves having to warn juries that the case under review will not include the kind of DNA disclosures that are commonly found on the CSI series, because juries come to expect that DNA evidence is always plentiful and available.
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