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Court OrdersSlate readers weigh in on how to fix Supreme Court reporting.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 6:59 PM ET
Supreme Court. Click image to expand.

Last week Jack Shafer gave the New York Times' soon-to-be new Supreme Court reporter, Adam Liptak, his first homework assignment: Rethink the day-after-argument/day-after-opinion format that dominates Supreme Court reporting and find a more creative, possibly Webby way to report on the court. Intrigued, I floated some ideas about how the beat has already changed and how it might change more. Then I waited for your mail.

Over the weekend, the Times' public editor, Clark Hoyt, used, as an example of the dread "reporter-columnist," Liptak, whose recent Sidebar column about the broad powers afforded the Department of Homeland Security was somehow laced with "opinion—from a reporter, on the front page." (Oh, the humanity!) Conceding Shafer's point that "journalism that is mere stenography is of little use to readers and is often even misleading," Hoyt went on to say that it "may be one step too far to have the same reporter write a column with voice and opinion—explicit or implicit—and news articles that are supposed to be completely impartial."

Welcome, Adam Liptak, to the Supreme Court beat, where no good knowledge base goes unpunished!

Sifting through the thoughtful e-mails you sent in, it's clear most of you are also struggling with Hoyt's dilemma over finding the line between point of view and neutrality in reporting at the Supreme Court. Reader Paul Chapman summarizes the problem this way:

My first reaction is that [more point of view] would be great, since objective journalism is a lie, everybody has a point of view, and the public is best served by being explicitly told what a given reporter's point of view is, rather than having it implicitly fed to them throughout the article. On the other hand, from my experience with human nature, I've learned that people often lose interest in what a person has to say once they see that the person holds views contrary to their own.

Steve Tatum wants to see SCOTUS reporters insert more opinion into their factual reporting:

Reporters should feel more comfortable with a mix of straight reporting and opinion than they have been. For people who really want to form their own opinions, there are many available sources for the opinions themselves. For everyone else, to the extent they like to follow what the court is doing, reporters' viewpoints permit the lay public to have easier access to court trends that will allow them to be more intelligent voters every four years.

Charles Peltz couldn't disagree more:

Court reporting has been one of the last refuges where the people and subjects covered by reporters seemed to positively influence the method they used. The slow deliberations and thoughtful analysis of the justices seemed to compel reporters to be themselves thoughtful and even handed. Please don't advocate that reporters express opinions in their stories. We have too much of that in all ways on (seemingly) all other topics.

Peltz points out that as the Supreme Court has shifted to the right, my own biases have seeped into my reporting and offers—as a conductor—this reminder: "The famous composer/conductor Richard Strauss admonished young conductors by saying, '[T]he audience should sweat, not the conductor.' "

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of the Supreme Court by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
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