There Is Too Much Bad Legal Journalism Getting Published For Me to Cover All of It
When an editorial board unironically uses the word “woke” in a headline, you are going to encounter some very bad writing in the paragraphs that follow.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post editorial board, mindful of its Jeff Bezos-imposed obligation to defend personal liberties and free markets on a daily basis, published an essay headlined “Pam Bondi’s Welcome Woke Rollback.” The editorial consists of seven paragraphs cheerleading Bondi’s efforts to eliminate certain Justice Department regulations related to disparate impact liability. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern pointed out, it is laced with simple legal errors that the board could have corrected by conducting between 15 and 20 minutes of Wikipedia research before hitting PUBLISH.
At one point, the board celebrates that Bondi’s change will “reduce compliance costs” for, among other institutions, police departments. Which is a good thing, I guess, because if the past several years and/or decades have demonstrated anything, it is that right now, it is too easy to hold American law enforcement agencies accountable for their actions.
Regrettably, by the time the Post’s editorial board published this dogshit law-adjacent editorial, I was halfway through an essay for Balls & Strikes about a different dogshit law-adjacent editorial, about legal challenges to Congress’s most recent attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. The structure of the argument, to the extent the Planned Parenthood editorial bothers to make one, raises the distinct possibility that the board members who are responsible for deciding “the views of The Post as an institution” may or may not be aware of the Constitution’s existence.
As I wrote when Balls & Strikes launched in 2021, much of establishment legal journalism is quite bad, and despite our best efforts at this small website, I do not think the powers that be at those outlets have done much to course-correct in the four years since. At the same time, I only have so much time on my calendar, so I want to be clear here: My criticism of the anti-Planned Parenthood editorial should not be construed as suggesting that the anti-woke editorial is any less wrong, lazy, or worthy of your contempt. It’s just that I maintain a strict quota for the volume of half-assed libertarian gibberish to which I will subject myself on a weekly basis.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
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My first few minutes of reading this email makes it by far the best site I've ever subscribed
I'm a longtime Washington Post subscriber, but after the Bezos diktat and handing it over to News Corp veterans during the 2024 election season, it's absolutely killed the editorial side as a respectable newspaper opinion section. A few ace columnists stayed on (David Ignatius, George Will, although Will kind of fits the new regime, free markets wise), but other than them it might as well be the Sun or the New York Post, editorially speaking. Washington Post journalism still seems to be pretty healthy and separate from the awful opinions, at least, but that's it; the editorial positions are 99% junk, and the reporting is still as good as any conventional journalism.
I've seen some pretty convincing cases made that Bezos was preemptively trying to remove the great big "Revenge Tour" target from his other businesses, especially Blue Origin. I can totally understand that, but hope that it doesn't also kill the Washington Post, since we all know it might not even work, and it would be a massive shame since Bezos really did save the "venerated newspaper" the first time around.