I expect to have more to say about the debate over voting rights, but one thing that struck me in reading much of the coverage seems to deserve a brief post of its own: how, for lack of a better term, slanted so much of the reporting is. I know, there’s nothing new about that, and certainly slant is not limited to coverage of voting rights, but perhaps because of its nearly uniform extremity I was struck by it nevertheless.
Take Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer prize-winning former legal reporter for the New York Times who now teaches at the Yale Law School (please!). She believes that what the Supreme Court is poised (she no doubt thinks poisoned) to do the holy Voting Rights Act will be “an error of historic proportions.” But leave that, and even her view that questions from Justice Scalia and other conservatives amounted to “ugliness that erupted from the bench,” aside, for now.
For now, concentrate on this astounding assertion:
You will have noticed that I’m making a premature assumption here about the outcome of a case, Shelby County v. Holder, that was argued just last week. Although I’m willing to bet that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has already drafted his 5-to-4 majority opinion, I’d be nothing but relieved if the court proves me wrong when it issues the decision sometime before the end of June. But except for a few wishful thinkers, everyone who witnessed the argument, read the transcript, or listened to the audio now expects the court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act – and seriously harm itself in the process.
Everyone … expects the court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act? Really? Everyone who’s familiar with the argument expects the Voting Rights Act to be eviscerated? There is literally no one who, say, hopes the VRA will be brought back to its original intent of ensuring that no individual is deprived of the right to vote because of race, and who thus believes the court should be commended for issuing such a ruling?
Greenhouse’s obliviousness to views outside her bubble bring to mind New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s often quoted (and often misquoted) quip that “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.” The difference is that Kael can be read as poking fun at her own insularity; Greenhouse can’t.
Greenhouse’s views on the VRA may be extreme, but they’re certainly not unique among the journalists writing about it. Take, for just one example, the National Law Journal‘s Marcia Coyle (again, please!). A few days ago, in “Academics see limited options for avoiding major blow to Voting Rights Act,” she quoted a large number of legal academics who indeed do see “a real danger that the justices will strike down the act’s preclearance requirement and/or its formula determining which jurisdictions must submit their voting changes for preclearance” and reported “almost universal pessimism about the outcome in Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder.”
Really? Almost universal pessimism? Could there really be virtually no legal academics or respected scholars who would regard seriously modifying or striking down the outdated preclearance formula as good news? Apparently not, judging by this and other Coyle articles. You can guess the argument of her Feb. 25 article by its title, “Briefs supporting Section 5 point to substantial evidence on which Congress relied.” Similarly on Feb. 28, in her “Key Provision of Voting Rights Act Imperiled,” where her lede was “The fear of civil rights groups and others that the U.S. Supreme Court might deal a lethal blow to a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 appeared to play out in real time on Wednesday in arguments before the justices.” True enough, but what about those civil rights groups (perhaps I need to list them for Ms. Coyle) and others who found the clues in the oral argument hopeful? Do they (we) not exist, or is it that such “others” are not worth mentioning? In any event, and contra the Greenhouse argument quoted above, Coyle also noted that “Despite sometimes hostile questioning by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito Jr., some civil rights leaders said after the arguments that they are optimistic the court will not leave the job of eradicating voting bias ‘half done.'”
Obviously Ms. Coyle found none of the insistent, volubly outspoken loquatiosness of Justice Sotomayor or any of her liberal colleagues’ questioning of Bert Rein, Shelby County’s counsel, “hostile.” Maybe she read a different transcript. (At one point [p. 21] Justice Kennedy was forced to interrupt a barrage of non-stop questions by stating “I would like to hear the answer to the question.” At another point [p. 33] the Chief Justice was forced to call a halt to Justice Sotomayor’s non-stop interruptions of Justice Alito by exercising his rarely used authority actually to call on Justice Alito, thus putting a stop to the interruptions.)
One of the ironies of the ubiquity of this one-sided coverage is that it tends to confirm the suspicions of many conservatives that legal academia and its journalistic translators are so lopsidedly liberal that conservatives outside that politically correct bubble are never noticed.
