I started writing for Above the Law in 2018. Almost immediately I began to get intensely pressured about the contents of my columns, not from anyone within ATL, but from the partnership at the law firm where I was then employed.
My God, what if someone realized their lawyer wasn’t the intellectual equivalent of a genital-less Ken doll and was instead a real, live person with agency who actually had opinions about things? The whole dispute eventually settled into an uneasy armistice after I made it clear I cared more about this job than I did about that one.
It is not like external pressure on journalists to slant or cease their reporting is a new thing. What is relatively novel, however, are the levers of power now being thrown against individual writers from inside their own houses.
Gone are the days of “The Washington Post” valiantly seeking to publicize its reporters’ work on the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a hostile federal government. Instead we’ve got the very same paper axing cartoons for being too critical of Donald Trump’s media crackdown as it bleeds real journalists due to its billionaire owner’s mandates in defense of rapacious capitalism.
Earlier this year, my colleague Mark Herrmann wrote an excellent column about how the intertwined business empires of truly rich media magnates prevent them from speaking the truth in the face of a presidential administration unfettered from the standards of decent behavior. If Trump doesn’t like what Stephen Colbert has to say on his show, for instance, it’s easy enough for Trump’s goons to use the federal government’s regulatory authority to subtly threaten the Skydance Media and Paramount Global merger until Colbert’s bosses capitulate — that sort of thing.
Mark also pointed out that for what Above the Law pays us for these columns, we are not exactly rolling in the Benjamins as a result of this work. You know what Above the Law does provide for its writers though? Independence. Integrity. Incorruptibility.
Sure, I’ve been asked to focus on different general topic areas over the years for different projects, but do you know how many times I’ve been directed at ATL to avoid writing about a specific person, company, or idea? Zero times, that’s how many.
I have written about sponsors of our site, to whom I am immensely grateful for the support they give this sort of work even as I’ve never gone out of my way to spare them from the indisputable facts. Nobody has ever said a word to me about it one way or the other.
Of course, my editors have been brilliant in catching an occasional factual error, and have always made the final work product better by fixing an awkward turn of phrase here or a tone-deaf insult there. But they have never told me what I can and can’t write in service to the delicate feelings of some corporate overlord, nor have they ever shackled me as to the manner in which I express the truth as I see it.
Plenty of other proudly defiant media outlets are still out there. The Trump administration is chilling more of them into submission every day though. The legal media is especially prone to this sort of pressure. Despite marketing about how hard it likes to fight for its clients, the legal profession has always internally valued silence, acquiescence, capitulation to power — see my experience in 2018, or more recently, several of the hugest firms in the country cringing like kicked dogs before offering hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of free legal services to Trump’s causes rather than fight baldly unconstitutional executive orders.
Not here. Not today. Not ever. I hate ass-kissing and try to avoid it, so forgive me just this once. Thank you to everyone at Above the Law for the courage it takes to produce this site’s range of unsparing content. Thank you to the advertisers selling great products and services while supporting real coverage of important issues.
Most of all, thank you to the readers. While I always hope that getting relevant, entertainingly presented information in lieu of AI-generated slop or some hack’s regurgitated White House talking points is its own reward, plenty of people nonetheless fail to make the right choices about their media consumption. I’m really glad that you did.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Integrity, Intelligence, Incorruptibility: You Might Call It Old-Fashioned, I Just Call It Above The Law appeared first on Above the Law.