Emily Bazelon

You are currently browsing articles tagged Emily Bazelon.

“He Will Try To Use The Press — And Also Control And Subdue It”

November 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

f_trump_union-leader_151228

It’s been argued by some seemingly sober-minded economists that wealth inequality isn’t a serious problem so long as those on the bottom rung economically are making gains, even if they’re far smaller than the ones enjoyed by their richer counterparts. This has seemed ridiculous to me from the start of the discussion about the 1%. My argument is that having a small class of incredibly super-rich citizens will allow the worst of them to try to erode liberties and seize different sorts of power, making a corrupt system even more so. 

One chilling way this can play out is for the deep-pocketed to sue an attenuated press that’s already been buckled by the seismic shift of the Internet and the deep disapproval of the public. A tiny earthquake occurred this year when it was revealed that Peter Thiel, a billionaire and a poor man, had bankrolled the demise of Gawker, a site he’s called a “singularly sociopathic bully.” It didn’t occur to him as odd that he then spent large amounts of time and money helping Donald Trump, someone who fits that very description, into the White House. The President-Elect, who has a long history of using the courts to financially injure and intimidate his critics, vowed during the campaign to reign in the press. His unhinged attacks on the media since November 8 have done nothing to settle nerves.

At this bizarre moment in history, there may be a few hands on enough money to foreclose on the Fourth Estate. As Emily Bazelon writes in her New York Times article “Billionaires vs. the Press in the Era of Trump,” “superrich plaintiffs aren’t subject to the same market forces” as the rest of us. The opening:

In 2005, Tim O’Brien, then a financial reporter at The New York Times, published the book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. O’Brien talked to sources with an up-close view of Donald J. Trump’s finances, who concluded that the real-estate developer’s net worth was $150 million to $250 million, rather than the $2 billion to $5 billion Trump had variously claimed. Trump, who had courted O’Brien by taking him for rides in his Ferrari and private jet, sued O’Brien for libel in New Jersey in 2006. Trump called O’Brien a “wack job” on the “Today” show — while, O’Brien says, continuing to curry favor with him privately. O’Brien’s publisher, Warner Books, was also named in the suit and hired top lawyers who put Trump through an unsparing two-day deposition. Asked about his finances, Trump was caught lying or exaggerating 30 times. “He thought he’d get a friendly judge, and we would roll over,” says O’Brien, who is now the executive editor of Bloomberg View. “We didn’t.” The case went through four judges and was dismissed in 2009.

Trump’s suit against O’Brien is one of seven forays President-elect Trump and his companies have made as libel plaintiffs. He won only once, when a defendant failed to appear. But the standard measure — defending his reputation and achieving victory in court — isn’t how Trump says he thinks about his investment. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he told The Washington Post in March about the hefty sum he spent on the case against O’Brien. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

Trump was wrong: Warner Books spent less than he did, and O’Brien paid nothing. But that doesn’t make Trump’s central idea any less jarring: that libel law can be a tool of revenge. It’s disconcerting for a superrich (if maybe not as rich as he says) plaintiff to treat the legal system as a weapon to be deployed against critics. Once installed in the White House, Trump will have a wider array of tools at his disposal, and his record suggests that, more than his predecessors, he will try to use the press — and also control and subdue it.

As a candidate, Trump blustered vaguely that he wanted to “open up our libel laws.” I asked his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, by email what he meant by that, but she didn’t answer the question (or others I posed). It’s not within the president’s direct powers to change the rules for libel suits. But our legal safeguards for writers and publishers aren’t foolproof. In the last few years, Trump has been joined by at least two billionaires who are determined to exploit cracks in the wall of defense around the press. The members of this club are innovators. They have sued or funded suits to defend reputations or protect privacy. But an underlying aim appears to be to punish critics like O’Brien or even destroy entire media outlets.•

Tags:

“The Definition Of Who Is Qualified Has Become Exceedingly Narrow”

February 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

rsz_supreme_court_us_2010

I’ve read articles that attempt to divine what type of justice Antonin Scalia would have preferred to succeed him, and my only response is “who cares?” That’s not because I had such sharp political disagreements with the late jurist and thought his “constitutional purity” was anything but, because I feel the same way about every member of the bench. These people are public servants, not royalty, despite the esteem of the position and the lifetime appointment. None of them should have any say in “hiring” their replacements.

The modern court has often seemed a very detached and at times arrogant body, one positioned at a great distance from the American public. That may be because the members emerge from such a narrow pool, the Eastern Corridor / Harvard-Yale / Federal Appeals Courts circuit, which is the reality of almost all the justices, right, middle and left. Operating from such a remove has its pluses ad minuses. No one should want to turn the justices into politicians prone to the vicissitudes of the endless media cycle, but the air they breathe should neither be so rarified. 

In a smart NYT Magazine piece, Emily Bazelon encourages a new type of diversity that almost always goes unmentioned when the important matters of race and gender are considered. Although she suggests President Obama use the current vacancy to consider those with unconventional credentials, that likely won’t happen with Scalia’s replacement, so factious the current landscape is. Bazelon, though, feels it might actually help neutralize polarization.

The opening:

Seven of the eight justices on the Supreme Court today all come from the federal appeals courts. (So did Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday.) Only Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was a judge in California, served outside the East Coast cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington. All eight attended law school at Harvard or Yale. None ever held elected office. Today’s court is “in some ways the most insulated and homogenous in American history,” as Adam Liptak wrote in 2009.

And so, here’s a question for President Obama, as he and his advisers are making their short list and checking it twice: Should the next justice bring a diversity of professional experience not currently on the court? Would a nominee who comes from outside the bench excite the country?

If every justice must have credentials like those currently serving on the Supreme Court, then the definition of who is qualified has become exceedingly narrow. “At a time when Americans are worried that the elite are running the country, and not doing a good job of it, this is the most elite group you could have,” says Benjamin Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has studied the pre-appointment experience of Supreme Court justices. “And it didn’t used to be this way.”

That’s true.•

Tags: ,

“It Will Take Years To Know How To Think Of Snowden As A Historical Figure”

July 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Emily Bazelon, who writes about judicial issues at Slate, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Some exchanges below about the NSA scandal, the Voting Right Act rewrite and journalism.

 _________________________ 

Question:

Given the limitations on what can be revealed about the usefulness of information obtained by the the NSA, do you think we’ll ever really know if Snowden did the right thing?

I’m torn between respecting that he believes he was revealing something we all needed to know and thinking he revealed nothing we didn’t already know and, as a result, violated his obligations for nothing.

Emily Bazelon:

I think Snowden did the right thing bec I think we’re better off knowing what he has revealed. I know the govt says he has seriously damaged nat’l security, but the revelations are broad enough that it’s hard for me to credit that claim. I guess I just wonder how many serious terrorists were using these major social media and web sites. That said, I agree that it will take years to know how to think of Snowden as a historical figure. Will he be remembered as an irresponsible maverick, or as someone w Daniel Ellsberg’s stature? In his own moment, Ellsberg was villified and faced serious charges. Those were thrown out bec the Nixon administration overreached. I wonder if we’d think of Ellsberg with respect now if he’d become a convicted criminal. I don’t think the US has much of a tradition of respecting people who go to prison. 

_________________________

Question:

Concerning the mining of people’s personal information, isn’t the NSA openly doing what a ton of other corporations and other Governments are already doing? Further, when individuals have willingly given out their personal information, is it an outside entity’s fault for obtaining information that individuals so willingly give? 

Emily Bazelon: 

The NSA yes is mining data that corporations mine, ie the tech cos. But the tech cos can’t charge us with crimes, right? So for the govt to do it is different. The potential for abuse is higher. I think there’s a distinction here about types of info and what ppl put out publicly v. what they have a reasonable expectation of privacy for. It’s one thing to assume that anything you post on twitter or FB is public. I think that’s the wise approach to take. But your email inbox? I think most of us assume that what we are writing on gmail, etc, is not available for public consumption.

_________________________

Question: 

Unlike “literacy tests,” voter-ID laws appear to be applied uniformly across the population in states where they are used. Does this make them okay, or just incrementally less bad than the bad old days? 

Emily Bazelon:

Not OK, because they have a disproportionate effect on depressing turnout and registration among young voters, and the elderly, and poor ppl, which means also a disproportionate effect on minorities. And they’re purpose seems suspect to me, since the voter fraud they are supposed to stop so very rarely happens. 

I just don’t believe in making it harder for ppl to vote. We don’t have high rates of voting as it is in the US! We should make the polls as accessible as possible without opening ourself to a lot of fraud. And if you think about it, in-person fraud is an incredibly inefficient way to influence an election. Person by person? that’s why no one does it.

_________________________

Question:

It seems everyday there are announcements of layoffs in big journalistic outlets, and the ones that are succeeding (The Atlantic, HuffPo) basically do so off free content. Will journalism still be a profession in 5 years? What will it look like? 

Emily Bazelon:

It will be more of what it is now–a tiered system in which there are stars who get paid a lot, and SOME working journalists in the middle, and then more and more unpaid or low-paid jobs, as you say. It’s a paradox: lots of ppl willing to write for free, esp opinion, and fewer places willing to pay for the reporting that’s the backbone of it all.

Tags: