ConsumerNews.com: Still a work in progress.

My favorite project right now is ConsumerNews.com, which I am developing as a news site after having spent decades representing plaintiffs. I firmly believe that huge corporations (who often find themselves as defendants in lawsuits) have funneled money into “think tanks” and the Chamber of Commerce to fund a decades-long attack on trial lawyers. I call this campaign “high-tech, high-priced jury tampering.” This unrelenting campaign has been so effective that people in some states have voted to give away their own Constitutional rights under the guise of “tort reform,” and some professional organizations have changed their names to get rid of the words “trial lawyers.” I still believe that it’s an honorable thing to represent individuals who have been injured or wronged by huge corporations.

That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in developing ConsumerNews.com. My vision for ConsumerNews is to build a reliable news site that will take an openly pro-consumer approach to reporting the news. Does this mean that the facts will be twisted to create pro-consumer news articles? Not at all. But it does mean that the articles will be factual, will be chosen to coincide with the concerns of individual consumers (including concerns that go beyond legal issues), and we will have no apologists standing ready to write an article justifying anything corporate America wishes to do. The plain, unvarnished truth is what is needed. As the masthead of the old Rocky Mountain News said: “Give light, and the people will find their own way.”

I’m learning that getting the bugs out of a substantial website can take longer than expected. In any event, we continue to make progress (though slower than we would like) and will announce the launch (when it comes) on this site.