Attacking Journalists Is Serious Business

Journalists are being attacked in unprecedented ways in our country. From White House press conferences to ICE arrests, it looks like all out war on the press. Journalists are being treated as if the First Amendment constitutional protections do not exist.

Most recently, the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Forte in Minnesota are so unprecedented and contrary to established law that they shed alarming and dangerous light on the state of our national justice system. The lawyers among us should be especially outraged. I know I am, and not just because I am a lawyer.

I also am a writer, and in that role, I have been a journalist. I have written opinion pieces for many prestigious legal websites, magazines and journals since founding Best Friends at the Bar in 2007. I am proud of the many articles I have written, but it only takes one bad experience to teach a very valuable lesson.

That experience came while I was a monthly columnist for the ABA Journal. In 2021, I published an article titled “Are Women Lawyers Paying Enough Attention to Upward Mobility?” which called attention to the dual roles of many women lawyers as mothers and professionals and included advice on successfully navigating obstacles on their career paths. That article followed the publication of three of my books supporting women lawyers, recognizing their challenges and encouraging their advancement. It also followed my personal experience as a woman lawyer with children. In other words, I knew the drill, as recognized by the three levels of editors who reviewed and approved the column.

But the faceless young women lawyers on social media had a different interpretation. They read the column as advice not to have children if they intended to succeed in the law, and they launched a brutal personal attack on me that included threats and doxxing and lasted for weeks, with enemy fire coming over the internet hour after hour, day after day.

Clearly, I survived, and the attackers did not silence me. Fortunately, they did not have guns or kangaroo courts, and their methods taught me a very important lesson.

Five years ago, I was not familiar with “cancel culture.” But I learned about it very fast. I learned that when those who cancel come from faceless social media, they cannot be stopped by factual responses or worthy defenses which only encourage further attacks.

Most importantly, perhaps, that experience was a shot over the bow that I did not recognize at the time. I thought it was about me, but it was not. It was about society. A society that was undergoing such divisive change and since that time has become almost unrecognizable in so many ways.

If you are a lawyer like me who cares, do whatever you can to combat the forfeiture of our society to such malignant forces. Make your opinions and fears known. Find powerful people who share those opinions and engage them. Do whatever you can and hope that the highest court in our land wakes up to the dangers and shuts down the hateful powers that have been created.

But be smart about it. Danger lurks. However, we may not get another chance.