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I'm Tyler McBrien, Managing Editor of Lawfare, with Peter Beck, an Associate Editor at Lawfare and a reporter with Courtwatch, as well as Seamus Hughes, a Senior Research Faculty at the University of Nebraska-Omaha's National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, and the founder of Courtwatch. This is a little bit of an opportunity in that we see the government and the Justice Department become less transparent. And if I were a public defender or I were a defense attorney, I'd really be thinking about my relationships with journalists and reaching out to them and wanting to kind of let them hear what's going on when I think that they should. Today, we're talking about Peter's recent piece called Dockets Die in Darkness and what the slow death of local newsrooms means for legal journalism. So, Peter, I want to start with you. I think many of our listeners will be unfortunately all too familiar with the trend that journalism in general and especially local news has been trending, which is to say downward for quite some years now. But maybe listeners will have thought less about how this trend specifically affects legal journalism and the coverage of dockets. You've coined or perhaps one of you has coined this trend as dockets die in darkness. So Peter, can you just sort of set the scene here? What does Docket's Die in Darkness mean? And what were you trying to highlight with this recent piece in Court Watch? Yeah. So when it comes to legal journalism, and there are certainly a lot of great legal reporters out there in the U.S., but there's a lot of emphasis on kind of what we think of as the larger district. So California, Virginia, D.C., New York, they have a couple of different eyes on them every day. Anything that's filed there, it's going to show up if it's prominent in the relevant big newspapers. What isn't happening in the rest of the country is there are all of these other districts that have less media there that aren't as nationally or legally prominent and stuff still happens there. So what we did was about a week ago, we picked a district. It happened to be the middle district of Georgia. We kind of just threw a dart on a map and picked it randomly. And we said, okay, we're going to just read through all of the cases that were filed in one week. And we're going to see whether they're interesting, whether anyone covered them. And what we found was by and large, I don't think any of them were covered. And that's a problem because you can't just look at these kind of central locations because that's not how the law develops in the U.S. There's stuff that happens all over the country and they certainly deserve eyes on them as much as those central locations do. Yeah, Seamus, I want to go to you to hear a bit more about the Middle District of Georgia. If you could just tell the listeners a bit about the flavor of the district as someone especially who has visibility into quite a few of the 90 plus federal districts in the country. What sticks out to you about the Middle District? And maybe what were some of the stories that you found that were especially shocking that you didn't see coverage elsewhere? Yeah, listen, I have a sweet spot for the Middle District of Georgia. And I don't really know why. It's just like if I look at the 94 different districts and I really like Middle District of Georgia, I like Iowa, I like Nebraska. And I like them as a reporter who's covered this for like the last decade or so in a sad way in that I know no one else has looked at them, meaning that what Peter just pointed out is absolutely right. So it's a relatively quiet-ish district, meaning that if you run the docket activity for Southern District of New York today, it would be, I don't know, five to six times the docket activity volume for the Middle District of Georgia for all of the week, right? But there are interesting points. And I think the reason why we picked this is, one was, if you look at Northwestern put out a report, and they put it out every year, of news deserts, right? And what they found was 212 counties lack even one source of news in their coverage, right? And the Middle District of Georgia, in there, there's 12 counties that don't have a daily newspaper, not even a weekly newspaper, right? But there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in that district, right? You've got Stewart Detention Center, so a large ICE detention center, which means a lot of habeas cases are coming out of there, so much so that judges are sounding the alarm about the emergency number of cases that are coming through. and they're just sitting there untouched. And if I'm looking at this, it's hard enough to cover the courts in general, right? Because you've got a fee-based system. Some records are only going to be available at the courthouse. There are weird intricacies of how things happen in rulings. You've got to kind of understand all those things. And so the bar is already high. You put on the fact that there's no reporters around and you can get away with some stuff, right? And you can sue, like we found this way, Like you can sue a local bar for playing a song that maybe is copyrighted and a big multi-billion dollar conglomerate can pick on a small guy who just started a company and had a jukebox that played the lonely hearts and broken dreams of Billy Ray Cyrus. And that I think would just happen without anyone noticing. Whereas if you were in a bigger district, make a phone call. You'd be like, listen, are you serious? You're going to file that lawsuit? Do you really want to do this? And they would drop it. Right? Those types of things. And so when you don't have any sunshine or light in the system, you can get away with some pretty egregious stuff. Yeah, it probably won't shock listeners to know that that highly specific scenario you just mentioned with the jukebox is not a hypothetical, but an actual case. Peter, could you talk a bit about the specific case that Seamus was just referencing? I guess make this concrete for people. It's not just about shedding light on dockets and general public awareness, which is, I think, a virtue in and of itself. But there are some real concrete material consequences of coverage versus no coverage. So maybe if you want to use this BMI case as an example here, any other cases from your latest piece? Yeah, so we've, as you mentioned, we've reported on this a couple different times. One had to do with kind of Big Whataburger, the Whataburger that everyone thinks about in Texas. They filed a civil suit against another chain of Whataburgers that was a drive-in that had been around for decades in North Carolina. And then Corwatch reported on it a little bit. And then they said that it was, I think Seamus can correct me, but I think they said it was filed an error or something along those lines. Basically, Big Whataburger was trying to come in to North Carolina's Whataburger's territory. And amidst that, they filed a brief civil suit against Little Whataburger. And that's one example. The other examples that we've done now too on are BMI, which is a big music license collector. So they represent a bunch of artists. And anytime that an artist's intellectual property is used, they expect a fee for that use. So with both this story and another one BMI sued a local music venue somewhere where local people would drive past and go into every day And, you know, if it happened in another district, there would be the kind of questions that Seamus mentioned of why does BMI feel that it's necessary to sue this really small local business that no one's paying attention to? But because it's happening in a little district, they can kind of get away with it and basically bully these little, little small music venues into settling over just playing a couple of songs. Yeah, Seamus, I want to go back to you to learn a bit more about the scope of this trend or this problem. I'm not sure if you knew how prescient you would be with the Docket's Die in Darkness tagline having come out just a few days before the massive round of layoffs at the Washington Post, which is the tagline as a reference there. So it strikes me as this is not only now a local news problem, but we're now seeing big layoffs coming to national papers. I assume, I don't have the data in front of me, but I assume some of the layoffs, it hit a third of the newsroom. So some of the more legal oriented journalists were also affected. How big is this problem? Is it growing? Where is the trend headed? Yeah, I think that's the issue, right? So like if you look at the Washington Post, they laid off 300 journalists, including one of which that covered the Eastern District of Virginia. And so, you know, that's a full-time job, right? There is a lot of activity in the Eastern District of Virginia. And a lot of it's national security, a lot of the public corruption, it's national news, it's the Jim Comeys of the world and all of those things. And having a daily reporter there actually matters, right? Because then you can figure out, like, I'll give you an example. There's a daily reporter, and I love this example. There's a daily reporter in Detroit who covers the federal courts in Detroit. And he realized that the back of the courthouse is where they bring people in for the indictments. And so he would sit at his office and look at the back of the courthouse to see which mayor, mayoral candidate, or some corrupt guy had walked in and he'd write the story, right? But you only know that by being a bird dog reporter who knows those weird quirks, right? Like you and I like have covered Eastern District of Virginia. Like we know the fourth floor, like if you sit in this one little corner, the prosecutors don't see you and they could talk about what they're doing and maybe get a little few notes. And you know that the clerk goes on lunch from 12 to 1230. And so if you want to get a document, you got to get a report that like those things matter. Right. And we can't now we're seeing like we can't rely on big national papers to cover even big districts anymore. Right. Wall Street Journal has pulled out. They don't do Metro coverage in New York. You know, D.C. Washington Post has basically ceded all of Metro to whoever's around left. Right. That's sure. A business decision. Right. But in the vacuum, what happens is you have these kind of small random startups, you know, be it a court watch of the world or anything else that we try to fill the void. But like, you know, we lose money every year, not as much as the Washington Post and we don't have a British editor in chief. So we're pretty lean on what we do. But, you know, if you brought in like these small startups, like, you know, we do they have liability insurance? Do they have the ability to spend, which what we do is $20,000 in pacer fees every year? Do they have the time and health and benefits and things like that? Like we're not going to be able to cover that with a two-man shop, right? And no other small startup is going to either, which means things happen, right? It means that when your reporter's laptop and phone gets seized because they're doing an investigation to leak into classified information, maybe you don't have a lawyer around to fight that back, right? And those things matter. Then you set the precedent that it's okay to look at a reporter's sources and methods on those things. And so when we lose these things, it matters a great deal on a whole host of options, right? And so it's not even the small, the big districts, but like the small districts matter too, because sometimes outside groups are trying to play the system, meaning that you might use, and I'm using a hypothetical that is not a hypothetical, you might use a Alaskan plumber to sue about union rights and having to hire union workers for a Alaskan government project. And you might say, why would you do that in Alaska? Well, you figure your way up and you get your way to the circuit. And now you have an easy shot to the Supreme Court to debate union rights in this country. Right. But if you don't have an Alaska reporter to catch that on the front end, you don't see all the chips happening at the same time. And so this does matter on this. Before we go any further, I want to make sure everyone caught that figure. Seamus, I believe you said $20,000 in pacer fees every year. Is that correct? Yeah, we could take down a small country if we needed to. with that. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people listening will be quite impressed with your receipt. It is a sad record that we hold, yes. But you bring up a good point. I mean, even with a fully staffed newsroom, there are still more stories on the docket to cover. So Peter, I'm curious how you think about it as a docket lurker, a docket watcher, how you focus your time and energy to which cases do you try to look out for to highlight? I think you had mentioned to me once that you're quite interested in pro se cases, for example. What motivates you when you're looking through a docket of these little covered cases? Yeah, that's a great question. So you learn to get a feel for it just because, as Seamus does so well, you read so many cases that you know how to pick the ones that will kind of evolve down the pipeline to become bigger things. And then as far as pro se cases go, some of them aren't the craziest in the world. So for instance, there's a label that comes with pro se cases that there's a skepticism that, okay, these people don't have lawyers, therefore they can't get a lawyer. Therefore, what they're saying is just totally off the wall. And that's certainly true, right? I've covered sovereign citizens. And for those who don't know, they don't believe in the legal system as the rest of us see it. And they're bonkers to say it lightly. But some of these other pro se cases, they are grounded in some truth. And part of reporting on those first case cases to gives them the kind of coverage that pulls them out into the light that they can get legal representation and set their cases up better to win in court. But because they don't get that kind of focus on attention, and because we do have the kind of somewhat appropriate judgment of pro se cases, they're largely neglected. And listen, the story that Peter did last week is a great example of a pro se case where an inmate is worried, has stage four lung cancer, and is worried that he's in a prison cell that is smoke-filled because they've been smelling cigarettes in there and wants to just get to a place where he doesn't have to do solitary confinement to be able to breathe, right? That is, let's be fair, if a judge doesn't pay attention to that, that case is going to probably get dismissed on standing or some other random small thing and nothing will change, all right? And we didn't have the bandwidth to check the veracity of his claims, but they're interesting claims nonetheless, right? And the fact that there's no one else there is a little ridiculous to look at this. You know, when Peter and I are looking at cases, you know, reporters in general should have a healthy skepticism for anyone in power, right? Don't allow that to kind of color the way you do your reporting or things like that, but you should assume some level of, okay, they're trying to get one off on us, right? And so it's our job is to highlight kind of the things where the little guy is trying their best, and maybe they're pushing against a machine that's not going to allow them to do so? And what are the touch points in the courts that are screwing up the ability to have a fair and legal fight about some issue? Why should reporters go to the actual primary source documents? Why should they actually go to PACER, pull the indictment, pull the complaint rather than it nicely summarized by the Justice Department in a press release I you know bit flippant here but why do these primary source documents matter Because the third footnote will completely underwrite the entire press release that DOJ just put out right And I say that kind of jokingly but not really right I give you an example Last week we did a quick blurb about a guy who was arrested for material support to terrorism for Hezbollah right But if you look at the plea agreement, he was talking to someone who he believed to be Hezbollah, right? So that's an informant case. But if you had looked at like the coverage there, it would be like, you know, neo-Nazi loves, joins Hezbollah. Maybe, maybe not. Like you got to look at the third or fourth cases on this. And the general tracking of all this matters too, right? So there's always the initial press release, which, you know, gets a lot of coverage. The Don Lemons of the world gets arrested, things like that. six months later when nobody else is checking, maybe they drop the charges of purported assault against a law enforcement officer in a protest or things like that. And so it is the constant kind of focus on it that matters a great deal, right? Peter and I have been doing this long enough that if we see a prosecutor that we know is a little bit fuzzy on things or stretches a little bit, we may take that at a different grain of salt than we do another prosecutor. Or if we see a lawyer who is suing some company and we know they're going to settle and they don't really actually care about, you know, stopping kids from being poisoned in West Virginia. They just want money thing like that is a different way of covering that lawsuit. Then then like a true believer who's trying to do the right thing on that. And you only get that by doing this repeatedly every day and getting a sense of it. Yeah, in many ways, it's the same benefits of beat journalism, just knowing the context, knowing when one word actually means something else. etc. And so this, I think this is a good segue to my next question or set of questions, which is what we do about this, if we want local journalism to survive, and we want these stories to get out there. I'm curious, both of your thoughts, but Peter, first, how you think of solutions here? Is it to scale a court watch or a lawfare? Is it to incorporate AI tracking tools to track dockets? As someone who has been doing this for a bit of time now and read quite a few indictments and and looked at quite a few districts. What do you think about those types of solutions or others? Yeah. So first of all, I love the work that I do for both Lawfare and Court Watch, and we do amazing work. And thank you to all of our listeners. But with that being said, we can't completely fill the hole that local journalists do every day. So when I'm reading an indictment, I simply don't have the bandwidth to, and I read a couple of indictments a day and search warrants and all of these court documents. I don't have the bandwidth to call up all of the defense attorneys and public defenders. I don't have the bandwidth to go call up the local businesses that are being sued and all of these interesting cases and to email these press offices of these big companies and say, hey, why are you suing these people? Local reporters can do that. And going back to Seamus's point, local reporters are going to be the ones to stick around in a courthouse and get to know the judges, get to know the attorneys and really understand the nuances and grittiness of the system. So we will keep on doing what we're doing and we will highlight all the cases that we can and advocate for why they're important and how we think that they're going to evolve. But at the end of the day, it's not a perfect solution to reporters and boots on the ground. Seamus, same question. Why can't I just vibe code a Peter Beck to help me out here? You should. You should do that. Like that should be your afternoon project. There are some models that are trying, right? So like you look at ProPublica's local news initiative. You look at the New York Times' local news fellowship they put on. But they're largely kind of band-aids into a gaping wound in the chest, right? I don't have a solution other than I know the solution isn't me, meaning that it is not enough for Peter and I to spend a few days looking at the middle district of Georgia and then moving on to another district. It needs to be sustained. It needs to be in a place that, you know, it's all well and good that we push it on Court Watch, but I highly doubt that small towns in Georgia have been religiously reading Court Watch's coverage of the middle district of Georgia, right? And so it has to go in a place and a venue of which the community can actually see what's happening. And there are a lot of smart people that are trying to do it, and I don't have a solution to it. And if I did, I'd run the Washington Post better than anybody else, right? So I don't know what the answer is. But I do know there are a few things that would be helpful, right? So it would be helpful if the courts would stop not filing unsealed documents on the dockets, right? They should file. The public document should be available to the public. It would be helpful if it didn't cost 10 cents a page to search every district, right? It would be helpful if they ran, when they uploaded the documents, they did it through OCR so you could keyword search things, right? Those like lower the bar for entry for the general public to get access to their public records, I think is better, right? In an ideal world, you have reporters who can put context to those primary search documents, because we see like, you know, the Epstein files, you'll get, you know, one crazy email that, you know, has no veracity or things, and it'll go viral online. Whereas another reporter, we will put in context and say, oh, actually, that was just a walk-in informant who knew nothing about that, right? So those types of things do matter. But at the bare minimum, I'm okay with more information getting out, and we weed out the misinformation there. Just a quick follow up. I'm wondering how many solutions you see on the side of the legal profession? So being perhaps more proactive in reaching out to journalists or a greater willingness to engage with the public? Or is this not really a barrier that you see currently? You're talking about lawyers or the... Lawyers, the legal teams on either side. I mean, this administration isn't really known for its transparency and willingness to engage with journalists and the public, but perhaps future justice departments and then, of course, on the defense teams as well to flag when a case seems especially important for the public interest? Yeah. My concern is whenever I get an email from a press person pitching a story about some filing in a court record, I usually am just automatically suspect of it. But I think there are other ways we can do this. Minnesota, the clerk's office there has a proactive press list where they send when the Don Lemons of the world get arrested because they know they're going to get 45 different phone calls in an hour and they might as well be proactive on it, right? So a more forward-leaning public affairs office at the federal courts would be helpful in general. I've been batting around the idea of having kind of a network of law clerks who occasionally flag stuff for us and things like that. I think that would be helpful too on these type of things. My general concern is just the volume is such that it's not going to be covered in any real way. And listen, if you're racking and stacking priorities, I probably would rather you send a reporter to the city council meeting where they're going to vote on the new zoning requirements of schools versus checking a lawsuit against a local watering pub, right? So beggars can't be choosers, but I get there's going to be priorities that fall in. In the meantime, we'll try to fill the gaps. In the past, I think legal journalism has been a little bit too easy on the side of law enforcement and prosecutors. So they have read indictments or police reports and announcements and kind of taking them at their word. And, you know, most people who are charged with crimes have some culpability for them, but there are also innocent people out there, plenty. And I think that this is a little bit of an opportunity and that we see the government and the Justice Department become less transparent. And if I were a public defender or I were a defense attorney, I'd really be thinking about my relationships with journalists and reaching out to them and wanting to kind of let them hear what going on when I think that they should And I think that journalists now are going to be thinking about how they want to really scrutinize a lot of that information more than they have in the past. My other concern is the incentive system encourages us to be as aggressively political and partisan in the lens of reading the court documents as humanly possible, meaning that you're more likely to get paid subscriptions if you're firing off an email saying, you know, the Trump administration did this, the Trump administration didn't do this. And how great is that? And how bad is that? Right. And there is a world where that's important to have kind of that level of analysis, but it can't be the only world on this. Right. You know, there are models out there that have done pretty good work. Like Bloomberg Law does, Bloomberg Law News does a hell of a job covering the federal dockets, but they largely focus on the civil side because there are law firms that care about that and will pay subscriptions to that. And on the other side, on the criminal side, there are, you open up your podcast and the first nine of them of the 10 are going to be true crime podcasts. So there is a world where sensationalizing of murders and crimes pays big bucks. There is less of a market for a just the facts, ma'am, approach to covering the federal dockets in general. And that's really my concern. Peter, for our listeners who may be concerned about this slow death of local journalism and the effect it'll have on the quality of legal journalism, do you have any advice for consuming news about dockets or about indictments? You were mentioning a few moments ago about keeping in mind that often the indictment is one side of the story. It's the story that the prosecutors are trying to weave that they believe will lead to a conviction. What other things do you keep in mind to be a very discerning consumer of legal journalism, especially given the challenges that we've laid out? Yeah, I mean, first of all, take everything with a grain of salt. So any kind of legal filing that you read, whether it's a civil case, a criminal, whether it's a defense attorney filing a motion, whatever it is, they want to tell you a story. And it's not just a story to the judge. They're trying to build a story to back up their argument. So don't ever read a court filing as gospel. With that being said, you can kind of tell whether or not things add up in cases. As Seamus mentioned, the fourth footnote, read the footnotes. And if the fourth footnote doesn't match up with everything else, then really start to ask yourself why they wanted to put that in the footnote. And it's because they wanted to tell you a certain thing to convince you of what they wanted you to do. As far as following local news, I think that you should follow the couple of journalists in your area who do the kind of long form legal reporting. Don't just read the reporting that is just summarizing press releases or whatever. Don't just read about, OK, this shooting or civil case happened in my area. like pay attention to the reporters who are doing the more long form stuff, because they're going to be the ones to reach out to the people who are impacted and get that broader story of what's going on. I mean, I would say also have a healthy bench of skeptical people who have no problem telling you you're full of shit. Meaning that, you know, every time we put out a court watch issue on a Friday, I get a text message from a defense attorney who is very angry at the seventh bullet that I wrote because it was too pro-assisting an attorney or something like that, right? And maybe I'm not going to change it like on the back end, but maybe in the back of my mind, I might be a little bit more skeptical the next time, right? And so there is a learning curve here that's important. And it's also important to hear as many possible voices and sides of this as humanly possible. I want to end here with a question for both of you. The same question, Peter, we can start with you. Other than the Middle District of Georgia, what other district do you have a special fondness for and why that district? Oh, I'm biased, but I have to say South Carolina. So I grew up in Charleston. And for me, I don't know why, but all legal roads lead to South Carolina. And we always get something crazy nutty out of there. Like we had a case this past week about a guy who went around threatening all the airports in the Lowcountry, which is where I grew up because there were planes flying over his house and we've had a big scandal down there of a bunch of restaurants were accused of selling frozen shrimp that was shipped over from China and it was dubbed like shrimp gate. So there's always something going on, but that's just mine. Seamus, what weird and wacky docket do you always keep coming back to? It's like trying to pick which kid you love the most. Okay. So I have a a strong love for the middle district of Florida for two reasons. One is there's not a lot of reporters that are covering that. There's a lot of good TV reporters. And actually that's something we haven't talked about. There are good TV channel reporters that are covering this type of stuff, but the way they're covering it is looking for video and imaging. And so court records sometimes don't allow for that without some level of sensationalization of it all. But I like the middle district of Florida because not a lot of reporters are covering it. So it usually goes untouched a little bit and it's Florida, right? So you're always going to get a Florida man somewhere in there. And so you get a good story out of the vibe on that. But it also depends on the topic, right? So like if I care about Russian exports, I really like New Hampshire because they punch above their weight on Russian export cases. If I care about seizure notices, I really like the Southern District of California because every time you do a border crossing, there's a seizure notice and it tells you kind of a window into the world. if I like human trafficking and smuggling cases or I care about those issues I don't like them I would look at like Arizona right and so the sense of it is is there is districts there's 94 different districts there are districts that will focus on things at a higher clip than other districts and so if you're a new cub reporter working this you can you know reach out to us and we'll be like listen this is the district you should care about like this is what works on this and then also I'm also biased in Nebraska given that I work at the University of Nebraska Omaha and there's a few stories that we're working on now and there that I think it's interesting did you want to share any of those before we break uh we are going to talk about uh 1980s bands for the next couple stories and whether a manager stealing your music is going to affect whether you can wear a red hat on your 1980s movies. So there are fascinating stories happening in Nebraska that we're going to run down. Well, that seems like a good cliffhanger to end on. Subscribe to Court Watch if you want to hear more about that. And I guess if you want an endless stream of Florida man content, then navigate to the Middle District of Florida docket on Pacer. But Seamus and Peter, thank you so much for joining me today and for your excellent Docket's Die in Darkness piece on Court Watch. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad-free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter at lawfaremedia.org. Supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help. And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patia, with audio engineering by Hazel Hoffman of Goat Rodeo. Our theme music is from Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening.
