23 ms·

I'd expect a bit more from a news company that makes the claims on journalistic prowess NPR does, like a brief summary on what grounds the judges wrote their di

• ceejayoz 8y ago
  NPR's standard of understanding before putting it in the article is likely a little higher than having a reporter skim and a Ctrl+F, especially in the era of "fake news" accusations.
  • jessriedel 8y ago
    If you actually have a writer who is already familiar with the legal aspects of the case, you can put out insightful analysis very quickly (cf. SCOTUSblog). Instead, we live in a world where the NPR journalist (Nina Totenberg) has just about every legal journalism award you can receive but doesn't have a law degree and is most famous for legal soap-opera material (e.g., revealing which supreme court justice had smoked marijuana). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Totenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Totenberg The reason there's no analysis here is because there isn't a market for it.
    • ceejayoz 8y ago
      The "legal soap-opera material" demonstrated his background check had missed something, and wound up in the nominee withdrawing his nomination. Single-handedly torpedoing a SCOTUS nomination seems like pretty meaningful reporting. Expecting journalists to have second degrees in law isn't a reasonable standard, if for no other reason than the financial burden it'd inflict on an already fairly low paid profession. (Hell, many lawyers struggle with their law school loans.) Chances are she's cultivated plenty of legal minds to help with analysis - perhaps even one or more of the justices themselves.
      • toadworrier 8y ago
        > Expecting journalists to have second degrees in law isn't a reasonable standard Who said anything about a second degree?
      • jessriedel 8y ago
        You misinterpret. First, the point isn't that marijuana use isn't important, the point is that this class of reporting is orthogonal to legal analysis. It would be as if the most famous professional football players were fantastic comedians but never played ball in college. Second, a law degree is a reasonable (albeit imperfect) standard if legal analysis is desired; that it would be hard for journalists to obtain this just tells us there's no market in it. (That is, people with legal training are not rewarded.) Law degrees are also super expensive to obtain for people who just want to do legal aid, but such lawyers need the training nonetheless because they actually have to understand the law to do their job. Legal journalists do not.
  • jrochkind1 8y ago
    Quite right, which is exactly why the article was just a brief summary, not including anything that didn't meet their standards, right?
• CJKinni 8y ago
  As a reformed law student, I can say that I've seen a lot of smart people try to answer questions about long legal opinions after a few minutes of ctrl+f-ing through a case. 90% of the time it worked well enough for them to stumble through a question. The other ten percent, they ended up making silly mistakes, like quoting from a multi-page hypothetical argument that lead the student to completely misinterpret the opinion. It's easy enough to misunderstand a nuance of a legal argument when you read opinions, asking someone to guarantee their correct about a summation of 120 pages of text within 5 minutes, or even an hour, seems unrealistic. News organizations like NPR like to be accurate when being accurate will only take a few hours of work. And I'd rather they be correct than fast.