The Corruption of Supreme Court Coverage
In 1979, Renata Adler, a New Yorker staff writer and Yale Law School graduate, wrote a negative review of The Brethren, Bob Woodward’s and Scott Armstrong’s book on the inner workings of the Supreme Court, for the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Today there is no chance that a review like Adler’s would appear in The Times because it so clearly anatomized the flaws of Supreme Court journalism — most recently evident in coverage of flags flown above homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Understanding how the attack on Alito fits into long-term journalistic malpractice involving the Court means examining the trends Adler pinpointed and tracing them to the present.
In her review, Adler honed in on the basic problems of applying investigative reporting to Supreme Court law. Unlike any other branch of government, Adler pointed out, the Court is obliged to announce the reasons for its decisions at length to the public, and its justices, appointed for life and free from outside lobbying, sometimes change their minds in deliberation. This means that “the only scoop there could possibly be about an institution [so] public …...would be a revelation of crime or corruption,” rendering “the investigative reporter’s ... obsession with ... breaking ... secrets” misguided when it comes to the justices.
In lieu of actual secrets, Adler showed, Woodward and Armstrong sold their 1979 book using the self-dramatizing “gossip” of bad literature. Mostly this took the form of unverifiable statements about one or the other justices’ moods or feelings (“furious,” delighted,” “especially upset,” “enraged,” “exceedingly upset,” “tormented,” “elated”). Or else it focused on the justices’ “characters” (that some justices thought another justice “evil or stupid,” that another justice cheated at basketball). Surveying the accumulated anecdotes that made up the book, Adler concluded that “investigative journalism, perhaps, might think again” about its approach to the Court.
But it hasn’t. Today, Woodward’s approach has become the norm, for two reasons. On the one hand, establishment journalism and its media outgrowths, funded by a handful of corporations indirectly dependent on the national government, has become, in the words of one prominent practitioner, “like any corporate culture, where [reporters] know what management wants, and no one has to tell you.” On the other, the Supreme Court has become America’s most reliable defense against national government expansion. The mismatch between the aims of justices and journalists, some of the latter of whom are also connected to government-funded law schools staffed by liberal legal scholars, could not be more stark. It has been reflected in Court coverage, where journalists have begun regularly using the gossip of bad literature to suggest “crime or corruption.”
Read more at American Thinker.