Jessica Smith

Jessica covers government and media for Legal Not Legal, tracking how policy decisions get made, reported on, and sometimes distorted somewhere between the two. Her pieces often start with a headline claim and work backward — checking a bill's actual text, a ruling's actual scope, an agency's actual statement — to give readers the details that tend to get left out of the first version of a story. She's also drawn to political legacy coverage, tracing how a decision made years ago still shapes the debates happening today.

Jessica keeps a folder of corrections and clarifications that outlets quietly issued after the fact, mostly as a reminder to double-check the first draft of any big story before repeating it. She treats a walked-back claim as more instructive than the original headline.