Chapter 8: What the Media Gets Wrong

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 — The First Arrest
Early rupture, authority, and the beginning of resistance

Chapter 2 — Before the File Was Opened 
Gifted education, faith, discipline, and early legitimacy

Chapter 3 — Becoming a Problem
Work, exhaustion, collapse, and the cost of visibility

Chapter 4 — Learning the Language of Power
Courts, probation, jail, campaigns, and proximity to decision-makers

Chapter 5 — The Apprenticeship
Training, mentorship, restraint, and learning how power actually works

Chapter 6 — Staying Power
Policy victories, documentation, long-term impact, and avoiding burnout

Chapter 7 — Why I Never Left
Containment, bad actors, ethical boundaries, and knowing when to walk away

Chapter 8 — What the Media Gets Wrong
Narratives, incentives, misinformation, and pretrial risk
Legal Note: Pretrial Publicity, Jury Pools, and Media Risk

Chapter 9 — The Record vs. the Narrative
Why documentation wins when attention fades

Chapter 10 (Epilogue): — What Remains

Author’s Note

Principles — Staying Effective Without Burning Out

Chapter 8: What the Media Gets Wrong

Most journalists don’t study law.

They especially don’t study administrative law—the quiet machinery where policy actually lives. Rulemaking. Enforcement guidance. Agency discretion. Deadlines that matter more than speeches.

It’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because the system they work in doesn’t reward that kind of understanding.

Administrative law is slow. Technical. Procedural. It requires patience and explanation. Newsrooms don’t have much of either. Attention is scarce. Audiences are easily bored. Editors are under pressure to publish something that moves—quickly.

Explaining how a regulatory board quietly changed enforcement policy doesn’t compete well with outrage, conflict, or personality.

So it gets skipped.

Media organizations also have agendas and allegiances. Sometimes partisan. Sometimes financial. Sometimes cultural. Often unspoken. Reporters don’t operate in a vacuum; they operate inside institutions that depend on access, advertising, donors, and ideological alignment to survive.

That doesn’t mean every story is a lie.

It means stories are framed.

What gets emphasized. What gets omitted. Which voices are treated as credible. Which are described as “controversial.” Which facts are contextualized and which are dropped without explanation.

Modern media is built for short attention spans. Headlines must land instantly. Nuance is optional. Corrections rarely travel as far as the original claim.

That environment is hostile to subjects like marijuana law, which live at the intersection of criminal law, health policy, federalism, and administrative discretion. It’s easier to reduce everything to culture war narratives than to explain why a patient can be legal in one county and criminalized in another.

Behind the scenes, many reporters are not crusaders.

They’re actors.

They perform concern on camera or in print, but off the record they’re often detached, transactional, and uninterested in outcomes beyond the next assignment. That doesn’t make them evil. It makes them human inside a system that incentivizes detachment as a survival skill.

I saw this dynamic clearly in a small midwestern town in Iowa.

In that town, it was openly discussed that a local reporter met regularly with the police chief. The purpose, as it was described to me, was to coordinate how stories would be framed so law enforcement appeared in the best possible light.

Whether people involved saw this as collaboration or routine sourcing didn’t change the effect: narrative alignment.

When a CBD-related case arose locally, that same reporter began publishing stories that repeated law enforcement’s interpretation of the law without meaningful scrutiny. The reporting was inaccurate in ways that mattered—misstating legality, overstating criminal exposure, and flattening nuance in a case that was still before the court.

At that point, the issue stopped being journalism and became something more serious.

Pretrial publicity shapes jury pools. Publishing false or misleading legal claims while a case is pending doesn’t just inform the public—it risks influencing outcomes.

I confronted the situation directly by escalating to editorial leadership. I made it clear that if the outlet continued to publish legally incorrect information that advantaged the prosecution, I would document the sourcing practices and expose how the coverage was being shaped.

The coverage changed soon after.

The reporter was pulled off the CBD story. Coverage stopped—not because the facts had suddenly changed, but because the organization understood the risk of appearing to influence an ongoing case through misinformation.

That moment crystallized something I had already learned elsewhere: access journalism isn’t neutral. When reporters depend on law enforcement for daily content, adversarial distance erodes. What remains is narrative convenience.

I’ve watched reporters nod sympathetically while patients explained their lives—then walk away to file stories that stripped out the very details that mattered.

I’ve seen complex marijuana policy debates reduced to caricature. I’ve seen activists framed as radicals while institutional failures were treated as inevitabilities. I’ve seen misinformation repeated because it fit a narrative and correcting it would require too much explanation.

This happens most often with marijuana.

Journalists frequently misunderstand the law. They conflate possession with distribution. Medical with recreational. Federal guidance with state statute. They repeat talking points from law enforcement without interrogating them, then frame patient advocates as emotional or biased for pushing back.

Once a narrative hardens, it becomes self-reinforcing.

Corrections don’t generate clicks. Complexity doesn’t trend. Admitting error rarely advances a career.

That’s why I stopped relying on media coverage to tell the story accurately.

Publishing primary documents mattered more than quotes. Blogging allowed me to explain things in full sentences, with citations, without needing permission or airtime. Readers who wanted depth could find it. Those who didn’t were never going to be persuaded by a headline anyway.

This wasn’t about hating journalists.

It was about understanding incentives.

Media doesn’t exist to educate. It exists to survive. Education happens only when it aligns with survival.

Once I accepted that, I stopped expecting fairness and started prioritizing accuracy. I documented everything. I wrote for the record, not the cycle. I assumed misrepresentation was likely and built defenses accordingly.

That approach frustrated people who wanted spectacle. It confused opponents who expected outrage. It bored journalists who wanted a villain or a hero.

That was fine.

Because the goal was never to win a news cycle.

The goal was to make sure the truth existed somewhere stable—long after attention moved on.

That’s the difference between influence and noise.

And once you see that difference, you stop mistaking coverage for impact.

Legal Note: Pretrial Publicity, Jury Pools, and Media Risk

In the United States, criminal defendants are constitutionally entitled to a fair trial by an impartial jury. Excessive or misleading pretrial publicity—especially reporting that misstates the law, exaggerates criminal exposure, or frames disputed facts as settled—can undermine that right.

Courts have long recognized that media coverage can influence jury pools, particularly in smaller communities where potential jurors are more likely to encounter local reporting repeatedly. For that reason, prosecutors, defense counsel, and judges routinely consider pretrial publicity when evaluating motions for change of venue, continuance, or jury instructions.

Journalists are protected by the First Amendment, but that protection does not convert inaccurate legal claims into harmless speech. When reporting intersects with pending cases, especially on technical matters of law, errors can have real-world consequences—even if unintended.

This is not an argument for censorship.

It is an argument for care.

Accuracy matters most when liberty is at stake, and the closer reporting gets to an active prosecution, the greater the responsibility to distinguish allegation from fact, interpretation from statute, and advocacy from analysis.

Understanding this boundary—and documenting when it is crossed—was a necessary part of protecting both patients and the integrity of the legal process.