NewYorkUniversity
LawReview

Author

Bob Herbert

Results

Commentary

Bob Herbert

I was a reporter at the Daily News when the term “Turn ’em Loose, Bruce” was hung on Bruce Wright. The Daily News and the New York Post had a field day with that. Two things struck me about that. One, the reporters and editors desperately wanted a “Turn ’em Loose, Bruce” story; they just wanted that story, they wanted to get that term in the lead, and they wanted it in the headline. The other thing was that not only did the editors not understand the implications of the facts in the cases that they were writing about–usually the case involved the allegedly low amounts of bail that Bruce Wright was setting–but they didn’t even understand the facts themselves. They didn’t care about the facts. The problem was that some of the stories were serious.