This morning's New York Times gives prominent display to a story that runs under the headline "Legal Firms Cutting Back on Free Services for Poor." The article quotes one woman "frustrated by the lack of free legal representation" in her effort to stop the city of San Francisco from demolishing and rebuilding her public housing project.
This is a front-page story? No, this is chutzpah. Not only does this woman want taxpayer-subsidized housing for herself in one of the most expensive cities to live in in the nation, but on top of that, she wants free legal assistance.
Beyond the lack of skepticism, this article is marred throughout by a failure to disclose some of the facts of pro bono representation. The legal work is referred to throughout as "free" or "volunteer." But in fact, when law firms win pro bono cases, they are often awarded legal fees by the court in addition to damages. Moreover, the lawyers try to claim public credit for their "pro bono" work at the same time that their trade associations are furiously lobbying to stop the use of alternative dispute resolution methods that are cheaper and easier than hiring a lawyer. The article points out that divorces and tenant-landlord disputes are mainstays of pro bono work. Yet in Florida, the bar association tried to stop paralegals from handling divorces at low cost using simple, mass-produced forms. There are plenty of potentially paying clients that high-end law firms are turning away these days, too, because of a lack of attorney time. All of this would have put the information on pro bono hours in a more useful context.
This Is How New Yorkers Speak: This is how a middle-class person in Brooklyn sounds, to the ear of a New York Times reporter: "'Hey Vinnie, kommen sie her,' Officer Keane called out to his partner, Vincent Morris, who was posted at the X-ray machine. 'You got any good antidotes about how slow it is today?'" The Times would be doing working-class Brooklynites a big favor if the newspaper refrained from sneeringly mocking their accents and malapropisms in news articles, as in this example from page B4 of today's New York editions. (We assume this is an attempt at mockery rather than the reporter's own misspelling and malapropism.) This is the classic, limousine liberalism of the Times at its worst; a handwringing news story today about the decline in pro-bono hours; a windy editorial about "a metropolis of poor children" -- but when the Times actually ventures into the city and comes across a working man with a Brooklyn accent, it makes fun of his speech patterns and fails to correct his grammar. Imagine the furor if the Times started rendering the speech of some African Americans or Chinese Americans in this kind of dialect.
Cheney and Big Oil: The Times makes a front-page story this morning about the potential conflict of interest for Richard Cheney as vice president and as owner of stock in an oil-related industry. The Times writes that Mr. Cheney "would stand to profit if oil prices rose, a factor that the administration's energy policies could affect." The article goes on to say, "There do not appear to be any directly comparable situations in recent history." Well, we guess it depends on what you would consider "recent history." Would the Clinton-Gore administration count? Vice President Gore, after all, is the sole trustee of his father's estate, which holds between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Occcidental Petroleum stock, according to the Wall Street Journal. And Occidental Petroleum could also be affected by the administration's energy policy decisions. The Times may argue that Gore's Occidental stake is worth less than Cheney's Halliburton options, but it's still a pretty large chunk for someone with Mr. Gore's net worth.
Late Again: The Times waddles in this morning with a news story and a column mentioning the flap over an allegedly anti-Semitic editorial in the Amsterdam News. Both the New York Daily News and the New York Post had the story about the Amsterdam News editorial in yesterday's editions. The Times column credits the News.