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Times Watch for June 24, 2003
The Times is clearly tickled by the Supreme Court’s narrow rulings preserving racial preferences in college admissions, devoting two-thirds of the front page to a phalanx of stories on the Court’s most significant decision on the matter since the Bakke case in 1978.
Greenhouse’s Gaseous
Grasp on Supreme Court Politics
Before the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling upholding racial preferences, Court reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote an analysis for the Times Week in Review making the absurd claim the Court lacks liberal voices.
“Will the Court Move Right? It Already Has,” claims the headline to her Sunday piece, which argues that on some issues, liberals no longer even have a voice on the Court: “The death penalty is one; no justice now holds that capital punishment is unconstitutional, as did Justices Brennan, Marshall and, briefly before his retirement in 1994, Harry A. Blackmun.”
For good reason, since the 5th Amendment to the Constitution clearly holds the death penalty to be constitutional: “No person…shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” In other words, capital punishment (being deprived of “life, liberty, or property”) is constitutional, as long as there is “due process of law.”
Greenhouse also has a distorted, funhouse-mirror view of the Court, claiming that while conservatives have long dominated the court, liberals never have: “Among legal academics, conservatives and liberals have their mirror-imaged constitutional wish lists. Conservatives call theirs the ‘Constitution in exile,’ a vision that includes state sovereignty, limited national power and strong protection for private property. Liberals refer to the ‘shadow Constitution,’ under which the government has affirmative obligations to alleviate inequality, protect people from harm that results only indirectly from official action, and surround criminal defendants and prisoners with a range of safeguards. One salient difference between the two visions is that the ‘Constitution in exile’ actually existed for many years, before the New Deal court ratified a 20th-century vision of national power. The Rehnquist Court's federalism revolution is now breathing new life into that pre-New Deal idea. By contrast, the ‘shadow Constitution,’ most of it at least, was never achieved, not even under the Warren Court. It has lived only between the covers of law reviews -- and in the occasional dissenting opinion from a Justice Brennan, Marshall or Blackmun. With their traces largely washed away, it is tempting to dismiss those efforts as ineffectual.”
One doesn’t have to be a constitutional scholar to realize that today’s Supreme Court, while not as liberal as courts of the past, is hardly a conservative paradise. After all, the “conservative” court led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist has upheld the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe. v. Wade, an activist decision utterly bereft of constitutional roots, and Miranda vs. Arizona, a Warren Court decision limiting the interrogatory power of police, considered by many conservatives to put an onerous burden on law enforcement. And of course, on Monday the Court upheld the use of racial preferences in college admissions, to ill-concealed gloating on the Times front page.
For the rest of Linda Greenhouse’s Sunday article on the Supreme Court, click here.
Linda Greenhouse’s front-page story Tuesday on the Court’s decision on racial preferences opens: “The Supreme Court preserved affirmative action in university admissions today by a one-vote margin but with a forceful endorsement of the role of racial diversity on campus in achieving a more equal society.”
Aside from that politically correct opening sentence, Greenhouse’s article is generally fair, laying out how the Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld by a 5-4 vote the University of Michigan’s law school’s racial preference program. In the related case of Gratz v. Bollinger, the Court struck down by a 6-3 vote the University of Michigan’s undergraduate preference program, which employed a racial point system.
However, Greenhouse still employs the flawed Times terminology of “affirmative action,” a phrase more benign-sounding than more accurate terms such as “racial preferences” and “racial quotas.”
For the rest of Greenhouse’s story on the Supreme Court’s decision, click here.
Old
Liberal Labeling Habits Die Hard
Meet Sen. Ted Kennedy, “Democrat of Massachusetts”
In contrast to Linda Greenhouse’s story on the Supreme Court ruling, Neil Lewis’s front-page story makes no attempt at balance. The bias is evident even in the title, which plays on the typical Times trope of angry conservatives: “Some On the Right See a Challenge -- Angry Groups Seek Justice Who Opposes Affirmative Action.”
Lewis writes: “The Supreme Court rulings on the University of Michigan admission policies set off a wave of consternation among conservative groups today. As a result, several officials of the groups plan to demand that President Bush choose someone whose opposition to affirmative action is beyond doubt for a vacancy on the court. Several conservatives and a senior White House adviser said the person who stood to lose the most from any energized campaign on the right to seek an opponent of affirmative action would be Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel who is frequently mentioned as a likely choice to fill any court vacancy. Although Mr. Gonzales has said very little publicly about his position, he is widely viewed by conservatives as heretical on the issue and the person most responsible for blocking the White House from submitting a more hard-line brief to the court on the Michigan cases.”
The carnival of “conservatives” continues: “Many conservative public policy groups and conservative political figures have urged the adoption of a wholly race-blind policy that shuts the door completely on any advantage for race or ethnicity. There is great scorn among those conservatives who form an important part of Mr. Bush's political base for any equivocation on such issues.” You think Lewis uses the term “conservative” enough?
In fact, in the space of 1,068 words, Lewis uses “conservative” 12 times. “Liberal” is used once, as a modifying adjective, when he describes “the more liberal wing on the court.” Yet even as Lewis calls out conservatives at every opportunity, he fails to label liberals as liberal: “Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican and a leading conservative, also said he was pleased that the court recognized the value of diversity. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, "The court's decision is a resounding vindication for the fundamental principle that affirmative action can be used in education to promote opportunity for all, and encourage interaction among students of diverse backgrounds."
Catch that? Sen. Hatch is a “leading conservative,” but Sen. Kennedy (who sports a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 3) is simply a Democrat.
For the rest of Neil Lewis’ story on conservative conservatives, click here.
• Times Watch's Topic Index Related Items: Affirmative Action | Discrimination | Labeling | Race Issues | Supreme Court
“Democrat of Massachusetts,” Part 2
One area in which the Howell Raines-era Times was arguably an improvement over its predecessor was in its relative lack of labeling bias. But the Times on Tuesday reverts to bad old habits. Neil Lewis’s story above overdoses on the word “conservatives,” while failing to label Sen. Ted Kennedy a liberal. In that same vein, Tuesday’s story by Robin Toner and Robert Pear, “Bush Seeks Medicare Drug Bill That Conservatives Oppose,” contains 10 “conservatives” versus one “liberal” label.
Toner and Pear write: “Representative John Shadegg, Republican of Arizona, an influential conservative, said he could not support the House bill.” Several paragraphs later, they note: “But a spokesman for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said tonight that Mr. Kennedy had ‘serious concerns about any attempt to provide additional incentives to P.P.O.'s.’” Once again, Republicans are given the partisan label of “conservative,” while the ultra-liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy is simply a “Democrat of Massachusetts.”
For the rest of Toner and Pear’s Medicare story, click here.
• Times Watch's Topic Index Related Items: Drugs | Labeling | Medicare
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org