Category: Journalism

Your Bias is Showing

The title of a story posted on NJ.com yesterday, Murphy signs costly auto insurance law that will affect 1.1M N.J. drivers, illustrates two of my gripes about commercial journalism these days, especially the on-line kind.

I believe that news articles should be primarily about providing the reader with facts. Other pieces, clearly labeled as “opinion” or “editorial”((I would prefer that the label “analysis” be reserved for much more in-depth reviews of an issue.)) can reflect the author’s point of view. I have found that adjectives and adverbs usually indicate the “article” is not primarily a factual presentation. In the story in question the title does not give the reader a clue about the nature of the auto insurance law, merely that it is, or will be, “costly.” Costly is bad, so the legislation must be as well. It turns out that the legislation raises the minimum liability limit for automobile insurance policies, which will naturally lead to an increase in the premiums. Whether this is good or bad is not my point, but that the title reflects the author’s value judgment.((Previous coverage of the issues suggested that proponents of the change were or were seeking to benefit personal injury attorneys.))

My other complaint is that the title, which is what appears on the site’s homepage, does not adequately convey what the article is about but instead serves as a piece of “click-bait” to excite the reader’s curiosity to go to the article (thus generating ad revenue). I know that’s what commercial journalism is about these days, but it is still annoying that my time is monetized in this way.

Jay Bohn

August 8, 2022

Another insidious political reason for opposition to charter schools

For two weeks in a row, I am surprised to find myself in large part in agreement with the editorial position of NJ.com (the on-line version of the Star-Ledger newspaper). Last week it was Tom Moran’s editorial pointing out that the biggest reason that the market is not providing enough housing is the existence of municipal zoning restrictions. This week it’s the Star-Ledger Editorial Board’s opinion regarding the Murphy administration’s “sabotage” [their word] of top performing charter schools. (Murphy’s sabotage of top Newark charters reeks of politics, unfortunately, behind the paywall.)

This editorial’s explanation for the Murphy administration rejection of the expansion of a high performing Newark charter school is no doubt correct, as far as it goes:

But the truth is, beyond this rhetoric, the governor is actively sabotaging the best charter schools in New Jersey. He is influenced by the state’s powerful teachers’ union, the biggest spender on his campaigns, which seeks to block charters because the teachers at most of them are non-union.

I suggest, however, that there is at least one other insidious political reason: charter schools deprive local politicos of spoils, in the form of lucrative jobs and contracts, to lavish upon their friends and supporters.

Jay Bohn

July 25, 2022

Post script

Recently the Star-Ledger Editorial Board published another editorial along the same lines, saying of Governor Phil Murphy: “He’s dancing for the teacher’s union, which opposes charters because they are not unionized, and is finally getting its way.” The story concludes:

The facts speak for themselves: By strangling the growth of top-performing charters, Murphy is allowing an ideological position to overrule the will of parents, paying no mind to the human toll of these decisions on kids.

J.B.B.

September 11, 2022

COVID-19 and Emergency Powers III – Still Not Much Has Changed

Two weeks ago I revisited the topic of an early April post regarding emergency powers. The impetus for the recent post was ABCNews.com’s article on a decision of the Kentucky Supreme Court regarding legislation which had limited that governor’s emergency powers. Inspired a an article entitled, “Most States have cut back public health powers,” on the front page of yesterday’s Express-Times, have much the same to say.

The article, sourced from Kaiser Health News, reports that 26 states with Republican legislatures “[took] away that powers that state and local officials use to protect the public against infectious diseases.”

The federal and state constitutions all provide for some form of separation of the legislative and executive powers. In this post I am going to consider state emergency declarations. By constitutional provision or legislation, the governor is often given the authority to declare an “emergency” and to exercise some degree of the legislature’s powers. There is no doubt that in March 2020 the new and rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic was an emergency. While it is still a crisis and we cannot go back to normal, I no longer consider it an emergency that requires (or even permits) legislators to sit back and accept whatever the governor decrees. The legislature is not prevented from meeting and has had ample time to assess the pandemic and consider the policies that the state should adopt to address it. Allowing the governor to rule by decree under the guise of a continuing emergency is a threat to democracy.((Let me be clear: My objection is to the process, not the substance. For example, I do not oppose, indeed I encourage, a legislatively-imposed mask mandate enforceable under the state’s criminal law (and not making store-owners the primary enforcers) and a widespread vaccine mandate, without a testing opt-out.))

While each limitation on executive emergency authority should be examined on its own merits (and there is insufficient detail in the article to do so with regard to any particular limitation), the real objection that the traditional news media has to limitation on emergency powers is that they believe that the particular policy choices made by governors are wiser (after all, they are “guided by science”) than those made by legislators.

In recent years the media have pushed as a guiding principle of political decision-making that the process must be transparent.((There is a quote, often but possibly not accurately attributed to Otto von Bismark along these lines: “No one should see how laws or sausages are made.”)) The legislative process is (or certainly should be) significantly more transparent than the executive decision-making process.

In New Jersey the governor has repeatedly tightened and loosened various restrictions, all in the name of science, but never explaining how the particular restriction (e.g., public gatherings limited to ten or to twenty-five) was related to a specific fact about the current state of the pandemic.

There is some information available about Pennsylvania’s initial lock-down order and Governor Wolf’s order that all non “life-sustaining” businesses be closed because there was a lawsuit challenging that restriction and the governor’s staff had to provide discovery on the process by which the orders were drafted. As the federal district court found:

The record shows that Defendants never had a set definition in writing for what constituted a “life-sustaining” business. Rather, their view of what was, or was not, “life-sustaining”
remained in flux. [citation omitted] Finally, the record shows that the definition of “life-sustaining” continued to change, even after the waiver process closed.

County of Butler v. Wolf, Civil Action No. 2:20-cv-677, opinion issued 9/14/20, p.49.

In the near future I intend to comment upon the amazing fact that we seem not to have learned any lessons from early COVID experiences.

Jay Bohn
September 20, 2021

Rethinking Flood Prevention I: Getting Started

On the front page of yesterday’s Star-Ledger there was a story entitled “Towns must rethink flood prevention, experts say.” There’s a lot to write about this piece, and this opening salvo will be brief.

When I see reference to an “expert,” or multiple “experts,” I usually suspect that it’s going to be a disguised opinion piece. That’s certainly what this one seems to be. After the obligatory reference to climate change, a large portion of the story is devoted to (and supportive of) stormwater “utilities,” a relatively new option for local governments to impose taxes (only they don’t call them that) so that some portion of the money raised can be used to address stormwater runoff.

I plan to talk about stormwater utilities in more detail in an upcoming post.

Jay Bohn
September 13, 2021

Ruminations on Voting

The lifeblood of democracy is voting. Many politicians would not act the way they do if the faced an interested and informed electorate. That does not mean, however, that we should not expect voters to make an effort and put up with a degree of inconvenience in order to cast their ballots.

One of my gripes with many COVID emergency measures related to voting is that the pandemic was used as an excuse to put in place voting changes that had not been, and under normal circumstances would not have been, approved in the legislative process. Once in place, and justified by a once-in-a-lifetime emergency (which is now looking like it’s going to last significantly longer than any public official was willing to admit a year and a half ago), these measures become the new normal. Anyone who opposes making these temporary, emergency measures permanent is subject to the harshest criticism and accused of voter suppression.((There are any number of policy proposals that are like ratchets: once in place, by however narrow a majority or whatever other means, they can never be repealed, like the Affordable Care Act a/k/a Obamacare.))

An involved electorate must be an informed electorate. Despite the rise of the internet and social media (and largely (or entirely) unread blogs, like this one), the traditional media sources, like newspapers and television, still have the lion’s share of opportunity (and responsibility) to educate the people about the issues. This is serious stuff and they are failing. Part of the failure is the result of underestimating the capacity of the audience to understand the issues. Instead of providing details,((See my post from almost five months ago, The News Media Should Give Us More Details — Not Just Conclusions.)) we get sound bites. Judicial decisions are reported through the lens of partisan politics with little to no mention of the actual bases of the decisions. Many opinion pieces are labelled as “analysis.”

As to the mechanics of voting, I believe that the method for voting most likely to impress the voter with the significance of the act is the traditional one, showing up at a polling station on one specified day. I would prefer that to be the common means of voting (and it is the duty of election officials to make certain that polling places are reasonably convenient in location and sufficiently staffed and equipped to handle a turnout of 100%). That is not to say that there should never be provision for what used to be called “absentee voting” and is now (to make it sound better) called “voting by mail,” but that should not be the default method.

Jay Bohn
September 9, 2021

COVID-19 and Emergency Powers II – Not Much Has Changed

About four months ago I wrote a post entitled COVID-19 and Emergency Powers in which I commented on the tendency of the nation’s governors to seize upon the COVID-19 pandemic to exercise emergency powers. I said

attempts to rein in the use of emergency powers have been viewed through the prism of politics or the perceived merits of the action taken rather than process considerations or the constitutional separation of powers.

Nothing has changed.

In a recent article, Kentucky gov suffers legal defeat in combating COVID surge, ABCNews.com reported on a ruling of the Kentucky Supreme Court ordering the dissolution of an injunction against legislation which limited the governor’s emergency powers. The ABC News article seems to imply that only governors can aggressively and correctly decide what’s best for the rest of us to combat COVID.((Unless of course the governor wants to prohibit mask and vaccine mandates, in which case local control becomes more important.))

Governors, like the President, exercise executive authority.1 State legislatures may have delegated to their respective governors some portion of their legislative power to exercise when necessitated by an emergency. In the absence of a specific state constitutional provision, why shouldn’t the same legislature be able to exercise its law-making power to act as a check on this delegation?

COVID has been with us for a year and a half. True, there always seem to be developments, but it is no longer something new that justifies allowing one person to be the sole decider of each state’s response. Every exercise of emergency power to avoid the inefficiencies of the legislative process makes it that much easier to see the next event as an emergency .

Jay Bohn
September 6, 2021

  1. The extent to which they share this authority with other officials not subordinate to them is a matter of the constitutional law of the specific state. [↩]

Too Much Hyperbole in Public Discourse

On Monday LehighValleyLive.com (the on-line version of the Express-Times) reported (based upon a video on the candidate’s Facebook page) that Steve Lynch, the Republican candidate for Northampton County executive, told a rally

“I’m going in with 20 strong men. I’m going to speak in front of the school board and I’m going to give them an option: They can leave or they can be removed. And then after that, we’re going to replace them with nine parents and we’re going to vote down the mask mandates that evening. … This is how you get stuff done.”((A more detailed account of the comments in context and responses is carried in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.))

While it is undoubtedly worse if he meant this threat (the only word that fits) literally, even if it was just “talk” it is irresponsible. Words matter.

The same article quotes Lynch’s opponent, Democratic incumbent Lamont McClure, in a less-shocking but still hyperbolic response, calling Lynch a “domestic terrorist” because he was present in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, attending President Trump’s rally, but with no indication that he was at all involved in the storming of the Capitol.((While merely attending the rally does not make one a terrorist, I believe that all those who entered the Capitol building itself should be prosecuted even to the point of felony murder because a police officer was killed during the riot.))

Everybody, stop shouting and talk like grown-ups.

Jay Bohn
September 2, 2021

Some Reasons Why the News Should be in the Newspaper

Recently I posted some reasons why legal notices should be published in a newspaper rather than only online. In this post I want to give reasons why the news itself is often better in print.

First, a physical newspaper has a publication deadline. While there probably is never enough time, there should be more time to get a piece right than the immediate publication model apparent with on-line news.

Similarly, once an article appears in print, the content (mistakes and all) is forever. An online article can be revised constantly, so its form is never really fixed.

These two considerations lead me to the conclusion that reading a print article is more a shared experience than seeing something online.

Some Reasons Why Public Notices Should be in the Newspaper

In my recent post The Purpose of Legal Advertising is to Inform the Public, Not to Support Newspapers, I wrote about news coverage of a New Jersey legislative bill that would have allowed the county sheriff to advertise the sales of foreclosed properties on the sheriff’s website in lieu of advertising in a traditional print newspaper. Predictably the news media is aghast at such a proposal because it threatens their revenue.

I noted that “[l]Legal advertising, whether of sheriff’s sales, land use applications or ordinances is required to provide notice to the public, not as a tax to support print newspapers. ” I further posited that proposals to provide notice by different means should be evaluated on their own terms based on their effectiveness as a tool for notice and not on their economic impact on newspapers.

That post should not be taken to mean that I want to eliminate legal advertising in print newspapers. In keeping with that caveat, this post will address some of the advantages of newspaper publication over posting notices on line.

First, there is an advantage in knowing where a notice is going to be published. Publication in the newspaper is traditional, and that is probably the first place most people who are actually looking for a notice are going to look to find it. If the party posting the notice is given the option of doing so online in lieu of publishing in print, a person looking for the notice might miss it.

Second, newspapers that publish legal notices will typically have a specific space assigned to that content and the reader who is looking for legal notices will be able to find it relatively easy. With the great variety of municipal and other government or websites (not to mention the lack of any particular common method of finding them), the reader looking for a particular notice might have to do quite a bit of searching.

Third, publication in a print newspaper is or will be a historical fact that merely has to be verified by an affidavit of publication or a copy of the newspaper itself. Once published a notice can never be unpublished. However, even if a legal notice is posted online in a timely fashion in a location where it can be found, it is all too possible for the notice (or the entire website) to become unavailable.

The foregoing are reasons supporting retention of newspapers as the location for legal notices and they have nothing to do with economic support for the print media.

Jay Bohn
June 28, 2021

The Purpose of Legal Advertising is to Inform the Public, Not to Support Newspapers

Yesterday NJ.com ran an article, Bill opponents called ‘vendetta against newspapers’ stalls in Assembly committee, which reported on a bill which would allow the auction of sheriff’s sales of foreclosed homes to be done online. The concern was not on-line auctions, but with a recently added feature that would allow county sheriffs (the officers who conduct such sales) to provide notice of the sales on their websites in lieu of advertising in a newspaper.

The article is mostly concerned about this feature, not because of detailed concerns regarding which method will provide the greatest exposure of the sale, but because it would have an economic impact on newspapers.

Although I appreciate the importance of old-fashioned printed newspapers to an informed citizenry (and I subscribe to several), I cannot agree with the position that legal advertising should be mandated for the purpose of their economic support. Legal advertising, whether of sheriff’s sales, land use applications or ordinances, is required to provide notice to the public, not as a tax to support print newspapers. Where there is a proposal to provide notice by a different means, it should be evaluated on its effectiveness as a tool for notice, not its economic impact on newspapers.

Jay Bohn
June 17, 2021