Abstract
The law and the Fourth Estate intersect in many important ways. David McCraw, The New York Times deputy general counsel, illustrates several ways that journalists negotiate regulation and freedom of information in the course of their jobs. The author provides insight into recent issues stemming the Trump administration, which he mixes with anecdotes and examples from long career as a media lawyer in New York.
McCraw worked at the New York Daily News prior to joining the New York Times in 2002. He holds a journalism degree from the University of Illinois and earned a master’s degree from Cornell before his law degree at Albany Law School. He worked as a journalist for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, and taught journalism at Marist College. He works as a newsroom lawyer for the New York Times and also works with commercial legal matters involving the company and in crisis response for overseas correspondents.
In a range of chapters, McCraw takes on large themes related to media and the law including the value of a free press, the threat to truth posed by cries of “fake news,” the changing roles of news staff, the threat posed by the social media portion of staff jobs and the safety and security of those staff themselves.
The book opens with a description of the newsroom on Election Day, setting up the theme of the danger of the assault on truth. This theme pervades much of the book. As McCraw notes “Trump scoring political points at the media’s expense in campaign rallies was one thing; waging a for-real war on the press from the White House was another.” (p. 11). Across the chapters, there are numerous examples of news being diminished under the Trump White House, with nods to reporter access, to public defamation of publications and journalists, and to false claims about stories themselves.
The book’s greatest value is in the view of how editorial decisions are made—how news actually works. McCraw takes the reader behind the scenes of decisions. For example, he discusses how an unsigned column from inside the White House that claimed a resistance within the government was exercising continual damage control around the president was received and chosen for publication.
McCraw also spends time on the changing job of news staff and how that intersects with his work. He notes in several places how reporters are able to, and even encouraged to, share stories in progress right away on social media. This can be a genie that it is difficult to get back into the bottle once it happens, and it tends to preclude getting and considering legal advice on whether it is advisable to share a particular piece of information. Declining budgets mean that there are fewer checks on coverage already, and instant posting is both helpful and harmful to the truth.
A particular strength of the book is the explanation of the FOIA process. McCraw explains in reader-friendly language that “From the start, the idea behind FOIA was simple: Average-Joe citizen writes to federal agency and asks for documents. Agency sends Average-Joe citizen documents. Democracy thrives.” (p. 217). He gives multiple examples of complicated FOIA requests producing ridiculously redacted documents, such as one where the entire page was redacted except for a single word: propaganda. He also explains the slow-walk tactics and tendencies to overclassify information that infringe on the public’s right to know. The frustration journalists feel when trying to get information the law says they can have is palpable, as he writes “FOIA is a dull, dull knife for cutting through all the unnecessary secrecy that is invoked daily in the name of national security.”
The relationship with the government is not all negative. McCraw is in charge of crisis plans for helping overseas staff when they have trouble. He tells a harrowing tale of the arrest and escape of reporter David Rohde and notes that reporter contacts in the national intelligence apparatus are able to offer some information. Security is something that the paper has to constantly worry about, one learns from McCraw’s work.
Although this book is by a media lawyer, it is not an especially good fit for a media law class because it does not encompass enough of the key issues students must learn as they become professionals. It would work well for a media studies class that looks at media industries, as the books offers a good understanding of the context of media law and ethics that does not go into excessive detail about cases. The book is user-friendly and, as such, it would be an excellent choice for community book clubs that could, perhaps, be sponsored by university journalism departments or by local media outlets.