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Seems I’m slightly behind on my news. Although I was vaguely aware that there was ongoing litigation regarding the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, the whole thing has been an issue that has largely dropped outside of my perception. It seems it’s back in the news again as U.S. District Judge David Lawson swatted away another lawsuit challenging the state constitutional amendment. But I’ll get to that in a later post. For now, I’m more interested in complaining about the dismal state of reporting on events that take place in the courts.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that mainstream news outlets are terrible at doing the little things that would make their reporting so much more pleasent. My notice of this news came by way of a link sent to me through email by my dad who presumably read about it in the newspaper.
The article was printed by the Detroit News and it seems to be a fair enough description of the case and its background on its face. But there is one important thing that I consider to be missing from the Detroit News article: Any citation which would direct the reader to the actual case.
I’ve gotten used to this lack of citation since it’s rare for a mainstream news agency to provide one, particularly in cases that don’t involve the U.S. Supreme Court. I miss the days when Fox News would close all of its internet articles discussing court cases with a line that read something to the effect of, “The case was Someone v. Someone Else.” This line was typically added at the end, with no attempt at keeping it in the article flow, almost as if it was an afterthought, but it was so very useful as a tool for easily figuring out where to go to double check the fairness of their reporting. Unfortunately, they decided to follow the prevailing trend of not including case citations, leading me to needing to find alternative ways to track down a case.
Fortunately, once I know what a case is generally about, it takes only a few minutes and some carefully constructed search terms sent to Google to track down other articles talking about the case, and I’ve been fortunate that, from there, I can usually find either a citation or the actual case itself. For this case, my searching led me to
a Michigan Daily article which gave me my next big clue: The name of the case, Cantrell v. Granholm.
Unfortunately, although the internet is built on hypertext, most news articles are not. The Cantrell reference doesn’t contain a link to anywhere, nor does a link appear in any sort of supplemental reading box or anything like that (I occasionally get lucky with CNN using these). So I have a step forward, but still no court opinion even though a simple tag could save me a fair bit of frustration.
Searching for the case by name didn’t turn up anything for me besides
various preliminary information (the Cantrell PDFs). Fortunately, I knew
the court which had issued the opinion, as well as
the judge’s name, which led me to a
list of his recent writings which included
the Cantrell opinion (which was, of course, not named Cantrell in that list at all).
In an electronic news medium, it seems absurd to me that the thoughtful reader should need to jump through all these hoops just to find a court opinion that is referenced in a given news article. While I recognize that the reporters may not have been reading from an electronic document, and so might not know exactly where the PDFs are buried, it would seem as though finding those would be something which our professionals ought to be doing. But even if not, what reasonable logic can there possibly be to not even including the name of the case being reported on; assuming the reporters have actually read the thing, it’s not like finding its name is hard.