Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
Dunno, Emily ... I, for one, am glad that Ed Whelan at NRO has outed us as raging drunks.
To me, the remarkable aspect of the assault on Greenhouse is—as you point out—that she warrants such extra-special crazy-ass contempt from the right wing. She’s not just “biased,” in Whelan’s latest. She’s also “sloppy.” It speaks to the impossible high-wire act still attempted by the Supreme Court press corps. They strive to be absolutely factual even while some of the best reporters on the beat have about 30 years’ experience and the political opinions that come with that. Long after the rest of the journalistic world chucked the illusion of objectivity to settle for the hope of accuracy, the folks on the SCOTUS beat still struggle mightily to hide their opinions each day. Some succeed better than others. I succeed not at all. And, of course, all of them slip up once in a while because the line between fact and opinion is murky. But Greenhouse is held to a different standard because the political right thinks she has this magical ability to alter the course of constitutional history with a quirk of her eyebrow toward the bench.
What. Ever.
Most interesting to me about Whelan’s latest crusade—er, noble truth-seeking enterprise—is that it does highlight the impossibility of what most SCOTUS reporters are trying to do: Perfect objectivity in Supreme Court reporting is a laudable goal. But unless we just reprint the transcript, we are all of us offering interpretations and impressions. That’s the expertise we get paid for. Interesting, also, is the fact that the convention is eroding on its own. Both Jeff Toobin and Jan Crawford Greenburg produced excellent books about the court last year that sidestepped objectivity for opinion and point of view. Yet nobody is calling for their scalps. In fact, most of us found their candor pretty refreshing. I am not sure whether anyone would contend that Jan’s book is objective while Jeff''s is not, or vice versa. I certainly didn’t hear rants about deliberate bias and dishonesty. Most of us simply recognized in those books the truth that different legal reporters hold different opinions, that it may be impossible to conceal them anymore, and that this may be a good thing.
-
sponsorship
Ed Whelan at NRO didn't like the piece Dahlia and I wrote yesterday defending Linda Greenhouse. We're not eager for a tit for tat. But it seems worth repeating that our basic point, which Whelan ignores, is that critics on the right go after Greenhouse with an overwrought vigor not visited upon any other Supreme Court reporter (and few other reporters in general). The point seems to be to discredit her and the paper, and what we were objecting to is the Times feeding the whole thing. (Though we did appreciate that Whelan didn't like what Hoyt had to say about him.)
Whelan can attack whomever he wants. What's odd, though, is that he seems so reluctant to own up to being a hatchet man. He seems surprised that we feel like he has gone after us, too. I dunno, phrases like "strikingly dishonest and incompetent--or both" (about my writing) and "dishonest and baseless" (Dahlia's) seem pretty clear. (Isn't this great--now he's got me doing his research and reprinting his nastygrams.) Whelan used that language during the Alito and Roberts hearings, a perfect time for confusing the conversation about the nominees with overheated zingers about anyone who dared to criticize them.
-
sponsorship
I'm not sure Obama can walk away—as he said on NPR this morning, if you don't respond to charges that you think are factually inaccurate, they tend to stick (Swift Boat). Obama also talked about how Bill is playing the campaigning role that the vice presidential nominee often plays—he's the spewer, as you say, D. In a general election race, Obama would have his own VP, but at this stage, he doesn't. And Hillary's response that Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards also support their spouses doesn't ring true here. They're not ex-presidents, they're not Bill Clinton, etc.
That said, is what Bill is doing really so bad? This is a campaign. Campaigns are slugfests. He's out therre slugging. I don't much like watching it myself, but I feel like it's worth asking the question. Is it more objectionable because Hillary is a female candidate and he undermines her authority? Or is this simply evidence of their smart (if unappealing) teamwork?
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?