Over-Reliance on the Law
Over the weekend, a friend of mine posted a video (below) about a Fox news report that was squashed.
Several years ago, Fox reporters were working on a story about Monsanto and rBGH. Monsanto, upon getting wind of the story, had their attorneys send Fox a letter threatening to sue. Fox wanted to squash the story, but were afraid the reporters would tell the world. So instead, Fox management beat the story into a form that Monsanto would like better.
The reporters were eventually fired for not being willing to lie in their news report. The Fox station attorney sent them a letter confirming that is why they were fired. The reporters understood this to be a retaliation claim. They believed they would be protected under the whistleblower statute. But the courts ruled that a news show lying on the air was not illegal and therefore there was no whistle to blow. Ergo, no protection for the reporters.
All of us discussing the post agreed that it was appalling. The poster suggested that we start a campaign to make lying by the news stations illegal. It was an instinct I understood, but all I could think of were the potentially disastrous consequences.
If we want to see what happens when it is easier to sue a news organization, look no further than the United Kingdom. Libel laws there are much different than in the United States. And corporations are taking advantage of those laws to sue newspapers and bloggers.
News organizations afraid that they are going to be sued are likely to self censor. In fact, this very Monsanto incident is the perfect example of the kind of self censorship that news organizations are practicing. Monsanto threatened to sue them, presumably for libel. And rather than risk the expense of a court battle, Fox’s response was to cave to the threat of a lawsuit.
While this Monsanto case is disgusting, how would yet more laws that people can be sued under help rather than cause even more self censorship? And even if there was no danger from self censorship, how could we be sure that honest mistakes were not prosecuted?
This is not just an issue of a free press or of free speech. It is about how we are handling all of our society’s problems. Our first instinct is – We must do something! We must pass a law! It has gotten to the point where we can’t walk out of our house without breaking a law.
Every time we try to resolve a problem by passing a law, we give up that much more of our power. And we tip the scales that much further in the direction of the wealthy and specially educated.
Access to the justice system, and results from the justice system, are dependent on how much money you have and how much understanding you have of legal codes, precedents, rules of procedure and a million other pieces of specialized knowledge that most of us do not have access to.
When we turn everything into a law, we turn everything into something that requires an attorney and a judge. We empower those people at the expense of our own power. If every solution proposed requires a law, then availing yourself of that solution requires an attorney. Can you afford an attorney? I can’t.
This post isn’t about bagging on attorneys. I worked for attorneys for a decade. And some of the attorneys I worked for were fighting the good fight. They worked on civil rights cases and sexual harassment cases. (I’m talking quid pro quo – you can keep your job if you suck my dick kind of cases, not ooh I don’t like the bikini calendar cases.) I even did a millisecond internship with the ACLU. But even the attorneys fighting the good fight cannot deny that the courts, for all the publicity that those few breakthrough civil rights cases get, are all too often on the wrong side of history.
There is no way to craft laws that can only be used for good, that cannot be exploited by those with the power and money to exploit. The solution does not lie in empowering more attorneys and judges. It lies in addressing those inequities of power and money directly. It lies in taking back our own power. It lies in coming up with solutions and problem solving mechanisms accessible to all of us.
