Legalise Journalism — Six: Being A Lawyer Doesn’t Make You A Journalist (See: Laura Coates)
Well, I never said that having a law degree was all anyone needed to be a journalist. I’m a lawyer with a post-graduate journalism qualification. I think people with legal qualifications would make better journalists, but they should have journalism training too. Just ask Laura Coates.
Now, I don’t watch CNN. I used to but I cancelled my subscription on Thursday, 11 May, 2023 when the network went back to its old tricks from 2016 and broadcast a Trump town hall. Few organisations share as much responsibility for inflicting Trump our the world as does CNN.
But if you are interested in what is happening on the planet and you believe you have a moral duty to be informed, you have to get your news somewhere. Despite my very grave reservations about The New York Times, I do still subscribe, which is where I saw this article on Coates.
The headline for the article reads, “CNN’s Coverage of Man Who Set Himself on Fire Shows Challenges of Live News”. As I am writing a series about journalism, I tracked down the video (linked above) and, reading about Laura Coates, I discovered she is CNN’s answer to Ari Melber.
I’m not an expert on all the celebrities of American cable news (but it looks like I soon will be) and although I recognised Coates when I first saw her picture, I had not previously become aware that she is a lawyer. Maybe I knew, but the idea behind “Legalise Journalism” is a recent development.
My Googling around Coates leads me to the question of whether “legal analyst” qualifies as “journalist”. I just found a Wikipedia page listing all the on-air “talent” at CNN and it’s going to take me a day to just check them all out to see who has legal or any other kind of qualifications. Sheesh!
My basic case is that all journalists should have legal qualifications — because, why not? I have yet to get specific on the numbers in this equation. A quick Google search tells me there are 1.3 million lawyers in America compared with 85,000 journalists and editorial staff (per Pew).
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So there are 15 lawyers for every one person working as a journalist. Another Google search tells me that about 36,000 people graduate from law school each year compared with about 11,000 who receive some kind of academic journalism qualification. Not a great match to jobs available!
What we all should understand is that both the occupation of journalism and the profession of law are under pressure from a variety of sources. Artificial Intelligence is at one end of the spectrum, absence of intelligence, per the MAGA morons assembled by Trump, at the other.
The problem is that people have every reason to lack faith in what is being presented to them as “news”. The reason I abandoned watching CNN was that they served up an hour of television labelled as “news” which consisted of Donald Trump being fed softball questions by a dopey hack.
If Laura Coates had been assigned to host the Trump Town Hall on CNN, the result, I would have to hope, as Coates is apparently an experienced trial attorney, would have been a vastly different spectacle. It’s even more likely that if Trump knew a lawyer was hosting, he would have passed.
During the whole of Trump’s presidency, a period in which he told tens of thousands of lies, usually to a gaggle of journalists sitting in front of him, never once — NEVER! NOT ONCE! — did any of those people even speak the word “lie” to his face. I believe that could not have happened with lawyers.
Not all lawyers, but many lawyers, litigation lawyers, are trained in the art of cross-examination. I myself have instructed at NITA, the National Institute of Trial Advocacy, in the United States. There are techniques by which a determined questioner can demonstrate that a witness is lying.
More important than the technique is the attitude. As a trial lawyer, it was a matter of professional pride that I would not allow a witness, on oath, in court, to tell me a lie in response to a question I had asked. That is an attitude I imagine many lawyers share. It has never been seen with Trump.
Laura Coates demonstrated her lack of journalism training when she was put on the spot last week. If she had been given the opportunity to demonstrate her training as a lawyer at that Trump Town Hall back in March last year, there’s every chance he wouldn’t be in the race right now.
