The News Media Rarely Get It Right

A number of years ago at the National Judicial College, I met a gentleman in his second career. In his first career, he was a working journalist.

At age fifty, he accepted a position with his state’s office of court administration. His position was as head of their public relations section. He told me that the job was a real eye opener for him because it showed him just how badly the news media reported legal developments.

His job had two major areas of responsibility. The first–and most time consuming aspect of his job–was to provide background data for journalists working on stories. For example, a journalist working on a story about a hotly contested divorce case that had dragged on for years might ask him for hard data about the average length of a divorce case from filing to granting of the decree. He said that responding to these requests took up most of his time.

The other part of his job–the fun part–was to write replies to an inaccurate stories that attacked a judge or the legal system. As a journalist, he relished writing replies, since he was a writer at heart.

His favorite story of news media malpractice involved a judge who heard a DWI (DUI in some states) case involving a college student. The student had been in an accident on an icy road and had hit a light pole, injuring no one except himself.  Under the law that was in effect at that time, the judge was obligated to give the college student at least thirty days in the county jail.

The judge gave the student the minimum thirty days in light of the offense being his first and in light of the student having an otherwise perfect driving record with no traffic citations of any kind. Under the applicable law, he could have given the student no more than sixty days, since it was a first offense and no one else was injured.

Being a decent man, the judge let the student serve his sentence over Christmas vacation, Spring Break and the first weeks of the summer vacation. This way the student was able to continue his studies.

Shortly after the sentence was handed down, a local paper wrote a story blasting the judge for not giving the student probation, ignoring the fact that the law would not allow him to do that. The gentleman who told the story wrote a letter to the editor pointing out the reporter’s error. The letter was never published.

Several months later, a magazine that covered events through out the state wrote a story castigating the judge for not giving the college student a much longer sentence in the state penitentiary. Of course, that story ignored the hard fact that under applicable state law, the judge could not give a penitentiary sentence for a first offense of this sort.

The gentlemen wrote another letter to the editor–this time to the editor of the magazine. The magazine published a drastically edited version of the letter along with a comment about how some judges always seem to find a soft spot in their hearts for criminals, ignoring the law entirely.

As my acquaintance pointed out, the same facts gave rise to two different news media accounts, both of which managed to castigate the judge while ignoring the applicable law.

In my years of reading stories in the news media about the legal system, I am often amazed at how little journalists understand about the role of the judiciary and the rule of law. If one only knew of the legal system through reading and seeing news media accounts of court cases, one would be left with the totally inaccurate belief that judges are demigods, free to rule arbitrarily and capriciously as they wish.

Needless to say, this belief would be false. Judges work in a tightly circumscribed universe in which our actions are quite limited by precedents from higher courts and by legislative enactments.

I’ll probably pass out cold if I ever read a story which places a judge’s actions in their proper legal context.

However, I am in no rush to buy smelling salts for my chambers, because the odds of that happening are slim to none.