Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Trial Lawyers?
When did "trial lawyer" become synonymous with vocations such as "drug dealer" or "hit man"?
Granted, some of those advertisements for personal injury lawyers make such work look dishonorable, but surely most of us would want to make sure the surgeon who cut off the wrong leg or was drunk in the operating room was held accountable. These realities seem to be pushed aside in the early coverage of John Kerry's choice of John Edwards as running mate. Kerry, according to Adam Nagourney's news analysis in today's New York Times, "even took a risk or two in compensating for his own shortcomings, embracing a trial lawyer who has less governmental experience than any other major vice-presidential candidate in at least 20 years."
I have highlighted the word "trial lawyer" because it does not seem necessary in that sentence. To be fair, David M. Halfinger's straight reportage does not mention the trial lawyering until after the front-page jump. Nevertheless, Nagourney's accompanying front-page piece, though labeled "news analysis," uses the job title as a label, giving credence to those who act as if there is something inherently vile about trial lawyers.
It's not that I think Edwards' past career should be ignored. However, the job title gets brandished as if it were something to be ashamed of; the truncated usage to assumes that the rhetoric that the corporate lobby has unleashed against trial lawyers is based on indisputable evidence. (Public Citizen is one of several groups with data debunking some of the claims used to restrict negligence lawsuits.) Journalists end up doing the dirty work for people who are understandably wary of lawyers fighting to make them accountable. Alan Murray, of the Wall Street Journal, has Tom Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on record with his group's plan to come out swinging against Edwards, abandoning the group's policy of neutrality for presidential races. (You'll need to be a subscriber to see the full piece.)
Journalists must not get sucked into advancing the idea that all trial lawyers are bad. Trial lawyers, in fact, may be among the hardest-working lawyers. Unlike $450-an-hour corporate lawyers who bury their opponents in paperwork and throw piles of green associates on the case (and bill for their time too), trial lawyers get paid when their clients do. They usually work on a contigency basis; the payoff can be hefty in big cases, but they don't see that money until long periods of research, strategizing, and fancy work in the courtroom. Instead of telling us that Edwards was one of those dirty ol' trial lawyers, journalists should give a sense of what kind of lawyer he was and the kind of cases he worked. Did he get justice for people whose claims would have been ignored?
I am not saying this out of any great feeling for Edwards. I am not registered with a political party ( in Connecticut, that makes me an "unaffiliated voter" rather than an Independent in the technical sense). Although people reading this blog have probably determined that my sentiments are more in line with Democrats than Republicans, the Dem ticket doesn't excite me very much. I am more interested in the public narrative as advanced by candidates, their supporters, and media, and I believe that citizens are better served when journalists interrogate the language they use to representate candidates and their views. Journalists should always ask whether particular characterizations and truncated descriptions advance the interess of one side over the other.
There's a chance that some self-correction on the use of "trial lawyer" as a pejorative could come about soon. The Spin Buster column at the Campaign Desk addressed some of the problematic and biased language the AP used to describe Edwards' lawyering days. The characterizations were edited for later versions of the story, though not before many newspapers ran the first version for their online editions. Let's hope more journalists catch themselves before they write during this campaign. Since one of my research interests is news media and free market/corporate rhetoric, I will be particularly interested in see how media deal with the business interests, as well as the economics challenges facing the working and middle-class that Edwards has raised ( "class warfare," Republicans and some pundits call it). I'll blog on this issue again soon.
BTW: The Campaign Desk , which is sponsored by the Columbia Journalism Review, is a great stop for daily critiques of campaign coverage.
