March 20, 2004

A Bad Decision At Yale

by Chris Geidner

The program, according to Yale (information taken from news release announcing the 2002-2003 recipients, which can be found here):

brings mid-career journalists to Yale Law School for an academic year to take courses and participate in seminars and other activities that will improve their understanding of legal and policy issues in order to enhance their legal reporting. Fellows who complete the course of study earn the degree of Master of Studies in Law (M.S.L.).

The most famous alum of the program is the NY Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Linda Greenhouse. According to the AP article:

Another alum, Dean Smith, an assistant national editor at The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, said the program has helped him decipher legal issues in many stories, including the current controversy about gay marriage.

"I think it's just a loss to American journalism because there is no other program like it in the country," Smith said.

As a former journalist, current writer, and law student, this decision greatly frustrates me. Both journalists and those in the law need to be working more to help reporters and anchors, as well as editors and TV producers, better understand and thus better explain legal issues.

Having seen Linda Greenhouse speak at OSU last year, I must say that I am very glad this excellent story-teller also has some doctrinal and theoretical teaching on her resume. It comes through, and is why people like her and Dahlia Lithwick (who actually went through the whole three years, as we know) are able to do the excellent job they do at reporting on the Supreme Court.

Although the AP article reports that the Knight Foundation "has other programs at the University of Michigan, Stanford University and Harvard University for mid-career journalists to study law and other topics," none of these are law-specific programs. According to the Knight Foundation Web site:

The Michigan program -- the Knight-Wallace Fellows at Michigan: Business, Medicine, Law, Education -- obviously would focus on law only on occasion.

The Stanford program -- John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists -- appears to even more rarely focus on law:

Putting professional journalists in touch with distinguished scholars and with leaders from the public and private sectors, Stanford University provides fellowships for an academic year of individually designed study.

The Harvard program -- the Nieman Fellowship -- is described as follows:

To encourage journalism excellence and press freedom worldwide, Knight Foundation sponsors two Latin American fellows for participation in the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard University, which emphasizes individually designed study for proven journalists.

To me, this appears to be an international program of general focus. I can see very few occasions when Latin American journalists would want to spend their year at Harvard studying the American legal system. Insofar as they could spend the year at Harvard studying international and comparative law, that's a good thing, but I don't think the Knight Foundation can really claim that this works as a stand-in for the Yale program.

So, it appears the one program in the country dedicated solely to educating journalists about the law has been allowed to end. Larry Meyer, vice president of communications for the Knight Foundation told the AP:

We realized in three programs we've already endowed journalists to have the opportunity to study law at other places. It simply made sense to us to give them the opportunity to go to those campuses.

This explaination, in light of the other programs, is less than satisfactory.

As I have written, however, the responsibility for ensuring that journalists understand the law falls on both the journalists and the law folk. Yale has made the decision not to fund the program on its own. Jan Conroy, a spokeswoman for the Yale program, told the AP that "[t]here's a lot of things we'd like to do, and a decision was made at this time that we would not do that."

That should not, however, be the end of this program. Yale should seek ABA, AALS, or some other organization's support to continue this program. If they won't, another law school should. The law and those whose careers revolve around it have as much to gain from having reporters well-informed about the law as reporters do in learning the law.

(Thanks to Howard for the pointer.)

March 20, 2004 08:58 PM | TrackBack