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Guest Poster Walter Dellinger on Journalism and Objectivity

And still on the subject of bias in Supreme Court reporting, longtime Slate contributor and appellate attorney Walter Dellinger writes in the following e-mail:

A former academic colleague of mine once said a very wise thing about "bias": "The worst kind of politics is the politics that doesn't know it's a politics."

It was once suggested that Linda not cover abortion cases because of her "bias" in favor of reproductive rights.  She had a "position." The assumption is that she should and could be replaced on those cases by someone without a bias. Without a bias?  Who would that be? Oh, right, of course, someone who had shown total indifference to either side of the debate. And that is because not giving a damn either  way about whether unborn are being slaughtered or women are being coerced by a totalitarian intervention into their lives is not a "position"—it is something called "objectivity" or "balance" or whatever.

The goal of fair reporting does not depend upon reporters having no "views"—it depends upon a professionalism that gets it right. And here is where the critics utterly fail. In the field that Linda covers, it would be easy to make out a case of unprofessional bias. The materials on which her reporting is based are all public. To take one kind of example: Every predictive statement she has made in assessing oral argument over a long career was either verified or repudiated by the court's subsequent decision. For example, a report by Linda that said "The Court appeared unwilling to accept the government's broad view of executive power" followed a few months later by an opinion of the Court that gave the executive everything it asked for would count as an error. Finding enough errors and finding that the errors are systematically in the direction of the reporter's "bias" should establish a lack of requisite professionalism. Showing bias (on the part of an unprofessionally biased Supreme Court reporter) would be like shooting fish in a barrel. 

Why has no critic actually undertaken to demonstrate Linda's bias from readily available public sources? Two weeks' work by a summer intern would do the trick. Doesn't the failure to do this strongly suggest that the critics actually know what they would find—that while she must have made mistakes somewhere in thousands of stories, what is remarkable is how extraordinarily rare such mistakes have been and what is dispositive is the total absence of a pattern of  errors in one direction that would be consistent with biased reporting. So the critics must actually know better. Which is why Emily and Dahlia are so right that it is very wrong to dignify these attacks as if they were honest complaints that deserved an answer.