SALT LAKE CITY — When I am asked, "What do you do?", I tend to respond either "I am a journalist" or "I am an attorney." On those occasions in which I say that I am both an attorney and a journalist, my reply tends to confuse the questioner. So many people see these two professions as fundamentally different.
Certainly there are differences in training, and perhaps also in disposition and outlook. Yet there are significant similarities as well. These include a respect for words, an appreciation for both specialization and being a generalist, and the need for facts to precede advocacy.
The practice of journalism can hardly be taken to be one unified whole. My career in journalism has taken me through metropolitan daily newspapers, a foreign newspaper, weekly and daily business journals, political magazines and Web-based publications. Their purposes and modes of operation were all very different.
The life of an attorney may appear to be more unified and structured. It is, after all, a profession that is licensed and regulated by bar associations. Yet even here, differences outweigh superficial similarities. There are hundreds of minute specializations, each with a series of rules and exceptions to those rules. There are transactional attorneys who facilitate commercial relationships and those who specialize in litigation. Additionally, the mode of one's legal practice depends on whether one works for a business, a government or a law firm.
Consider, though, the ways journalism and the law are alike:
Words matter. For both the author and the attorney, words are the tools of the trade. Journalists are passionate about words. The best journalists understand the need to explain something simply, without getting lost in details.
When I work with younger writers, I often quote from William Strunk and E.B. White's "Elements of Style:" "Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
Lawyers sometimes fall short on brevity. But their trade teaches us the critical role of cross-examination: the need to take out every relevant detail, dust it off, hold it up and probe it with rigor and exactness.
As is recounted in a children's book (by Kay Winters and Nancy Carpenter) about one of our nation's most famous lawyers, "Abe Lincoln: The Boy Who Loved Books:" "Abe saw that words could free or jail a man. He found that words could change the way folks thought. ... From the wilderness to the White House, he learned the power of words and used them well."
Generalists and specialists. Journalists are often called the world’s last generalists. But this is no longer true. A daily newspaper once aggregated the important news of the world for a general audience, but that function is now filled by Google News or Facebook’s news feed. When the most knowledgeable source for a given story is only a click away on the Internet, successful journalists are also specialists in a topic or topics that they know best.
Lawyers have specialized longer than journalists. But they also need to function in a general advice-giving capacity. A successful lawyer is a generalist in his or her understanding of the range of tools — the types of agreements or causes of action — that will equip their clients with the ability to solve their legal problems.
Facts before advocacy. A principal complaint about the mainstream media has been one of political bias. According to a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center, Americans have followed journalists into respective political corners: Roughly 1 in 5 people with consistently conservative or consistently liberal views rely on different sources of information and distrust the media outlets relied upon by the other side.
I’m skeptical of the argument that media outlets have led to greater political polarization. The “just the facts, ma’am” approach to journalism in recent decades is anomalous given the history of our nation’s partisan press. Journalists of necessity compile facts — but they do a disservice to readers if they withhold their informed analyses and judgments.
Conversely, everyone expects attorneys to vigorously contest for their side. Less well known is the lawyer’s responsibility to be factually accurate and to faithfully represent the law, including court decisions adverse to their side.
Instead of seeing journalists solely as fact-gatherers and attorneys solely as advocates, it would be truer to see reporters and lawyers both as purveyors of facts before advocacy. Whether in a court of law or the court of public opinion, the most powerful advocacy is always built upon a solid factual infrastructure.
Drew Clark can be reached via email: drew@drewclark.com, or on Twitter @drewclark, or at www.drewclark.com.