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Legal News

: Lawbeat

LAT gives Prop 8 the drive-by treatment

By Mark Obbie

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If this is the best that the LA Times can muster in covering a huge legal issue at a critical turning point, then I pity California voters -- and anyone else in the country, on either side, who's riveted to the Proposition 8 story. For starters, reporter Jessica Garrison tackled a worthwhile and logical angle, which her lede defines in clear and broad terms:

In normal political campaigns, election day -- win or lose -- signals the end.Not so with Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman that was approved by 52% of California voters Nov. 4.Instead of settling the question of gay marriage in California, the election merely ushered in a new, and in many cases more heated, phase of the campaign, with both sides looking ahead to 2010, when the matter could be back on the ballot.

But Garrison's overly slim 1,000-word piece (blame her editors and the newspaper biz) barely skims the surface of that story. Through a combination of opaque or anecdotal sourcing, the story lacks definitive and clearly attributed facts at the heart of the what-next story. For example, Garrison writes about the responses to last week's California Supreme Court decision to hear challenges to the voter-approved constitutional amendment:

If justices uphold the proposition, gay marriage backers plan to put their own measure before voters perhaps as soon as 2010 to re-amend the state Constitution to allow the marriages.If the justices toss out Proposition 8, some gay-marriage opponents have talked of putting something on the ballot themselves, either to again ban gay marriage or to oust Supreme Court justices or both.

Intriguing! But who are these backers and opponents who can confirm this? We're not told. Some leaders are quoted later in the story, on other questions, amid other quotes from ordinary activists, but there's no way for a reader to tell if Garrison nailed the strategy details through definitive sourcing, or just hunches. Or take this passive-voice-riddled set of facts:

Many on the No on 8 side are also trying to figure out what went wrong with their campaign. Their side was leading in polls in the weeks before the election and has since been accused of not doing enough outreach to blacks and Latinos and not responding quickly or effectively enough to the other side's claims about what effect the proposition would have on public school curriculums.

I'm not saying this is untrue. I'm asking: who can trust such assertions without clearer attribution? I'm also wondering how readers can choose sides on any basis other than the binary, gut-sense question -- gay marriage, good or bad? -- when stories like these say absolutely nothing about the constitutional basis for the Supreme Court's original ruling; the arguments on both sides of the pending court challenge; and the legal questions that surround such a remarkable exercise in constitution-based policy-making. When I search the Times' Web site for an index to all of the paper's coverage of Proposition 8 -- thinking that perhaps there are backgrounders or more thorough stories to fill in the gaps -- I come up empty handed, finding only sporadic daily coverage since Nov. 4. Considering the volatility of this story -- a monumental struggle between competing social values, and among the courts and voters and legislators -- I want clearer, deeper, original reporting than what the Times seems to be throwing at this story. (Via How Appealing)

Full post as published by Lawbeat on November 23, 2008 (boomark / email).