This article is a very good example of why current media is terrible.
This article is a summary of someone else's work. It does not contain any news. Literally. It contains no new information, no original reporting, and adds nothing to the understanding of the situation in Florida one may glean from reading the CNN article the New Republic is ripping off. What is does is take the reporting done by CNN, which was far more even-keeled, and dresses it up in more incendiary language to outrage media consumers who want information that is consistent with what they already believe.
If you didn't read the CNN article, this is what it did: A reporter at CNN interviewed several lawyers who had cases before Cannon. Those lawyers were asked what they thought about the judge and offered the following opinions:
- She is very detail oriented
- She is rigid and provincial when it comes to procedure and local rules.
- She is indecisive.
- She sometimes seems overwhelmed.
- She focuses on abstract issues, or otherwise obsesses over elements of the case that seem irrelevant to trial lawyers rather than making decisions about factual questions.
- She is not going to defer to the prosecutor automatically, even in situations where the defense and prosecutor agree.
- One lawyer felt she was harsh towards defendants in general but was less harsh towards Trump in this particular case.
The CNN article suggests that a a combination of some or all of factors 1-7 have made it easy for the defense in the Trump case to gum up the works and slow the progress of the trial down.
Most of these opinions are fairly anodyne. Many of them could describe almost any federal judge. Some of them even seem like good characteristics for a federal judge. (I think it is good, for example, that a federal judge requires prosecutors to back up their assertions and motions with specificity, rather than try to justify motions with generic claims.) Whats more is that none of these opinions would be particularly surprising to anyone who has been following the news surrounding Trump's Florida trial. Nothing in the CNN reporting is particularly "damning" as the New Republic characterizes the report. The New Republic focuses on the strongest criticism of Cannon, but that criticism is the opinion of a single lawyer, and only represented a small portion of the overall report offered by CNN. If you only read the New Republic's version, you would be forgiven for thinking that was the focus of the CNN article. In that case you would have an inaccurate view of the article, which is itself mostly a summary of opinions. I will also note that, when the New Republic was copying CNN's homework, they ignored the praise defense lawyers had for Cannon. But I suppose if they had included the praise it would have been harder to call the article "damning".
To put it plainly, the New Republic article is trash. It is a summary of someone else's reporting that hypes up the most negative opinion about a federal judge, while ignoring the bulk of the same reporting.
