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Times Watch for
March 5, 2004
Justice Blackmun Grows In Greenhouse
The only print reporter to gain advance access to the private papers of deceased Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun (opened to the public Thursday), Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse returns the favor in her front-page story, the headline of which casts the conservative-turned-liberal Blackmun in glowing terms. The big news in her Thursday analysis: Revelations of the effort by the trio of Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, and David Souter to preserve Roe v. Wade in the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The headline to Greenhouse's story, "Documents Reveal the Evolution of a Justice," echoes the liberal idea that Blackmun (who joined the court as a conservative appointee of Richard Nixon in 1970 and retired in 1994 as perhaps the court's most liberal member) grew in office by becoming a reliable liberal on abortion rights and the death penalty.
The headline of the jump goes even further: "Released Documents Show The Remarkable Evolution Of a Supreme Court Justice."
Greenhouse cites political scientist Joseph Kobylka, who is writing a biography of Blackmun: "The effort of defending the right to abortion in an increasingly hostile climate made Justice Blackmun more sensitive to women's rights and to equality claims in general, Professor Kobylka has written. Similarly, he argues, Roe v. Wade also turned Justice Blackmun into a strong defender of free speech; his first opinion for the court in the area of commercial speech, a landmark decision, found First Amendment protection for a Virginia newspaper publisher who printed an advertisement for an abortion referral service that was then illegal."
(Some pro-life protesters might disagree about linking abortion rights and free speech. After all, Blackmun signed on to the Supreme Court's 6-3 majority decision in
Madsen v.
Women's Health Center, Inc., upholding a lower court ruling that a 36-foot buffer zone around an abortion clinic entrance did not violate the free speech rights of pro-life protesters.)
Greenhouse insists liberalism was leaving the court as early as 1970: "On the court, the old liberal order was vanishing. Chief Justice Earl Warren had retired a year earlier. Justice Hugo L. Black would be gone in little more than a year, William O. Douglas in five. It would be more than two decades before a Democratic president would have a chance to make a Supreme Court nomination."
Yet that still left the very liberal justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall on the court. (On a related note, Greenhouse actually believes the current Supreme Court lacks liberal voices.)
Then Greenhouse offers a pro-abortion medical opinion: "Although abortion would prove to be a more troubling issue for the court as a whole, it posed considerably less of a personal challenge for Justice Blackmun. After 10 years as general counsel to the Mayo Clinic, he viewed the laws that criminalized abortion laws as many in the medical profession did: as a threat to good medical practice, a public health problem that drove desperate women into harm's way."
Greenhouse continues: "While the Blackmun papers illuminate his own role and offer some fascinating detail, they do not change the basic narrative. However, his files on the District of Columbia case shed new light on Justice Blackmun's readiness, earlier than has been recognized, to embrace the right to privacy as the foundation for the right to abortion….he reviewed the court's recent precedents establishing a right to privacy for the use of birth control and the private possession of pornography."
Of course, there is no "right to privacy" in the Constitution, which Greenhouse could have easily made plain to her readership. As MRC's Brent Baker noted last April when discussing general journalistic lack of knowledge on the matter: "A right to 'privacy' was first broached by the Supreme Court in its 1965 Griswold v Connecticut decision overturning a state ban on birth control and solidified in the majority's Roe v Wade discovery of a privacy right in the 'penumbra' of the Constitution in order to find rationale for overturning state bans on abortion. But it isn't in the Constitution."
For the rest of Greenhouse's long look at Blackmun, click here.
• Abortion | Harry Blackmun | Constitution | Linda Greenhouse | Supreme Court
Revkin's Icy Reaction to Soviet Union's Collapse
Andrew Revkin finds another victim of Communism at the North Pole in "Rescue On for Russian Crew After Arctic Camp Collapses."
In Friday's Times, the science writer laments the failure of a Russian mission to the North Pole and includes this historical tidbit: "Beginning in 1937, the Soviet Union established a series of drifting ice stations near the North Pole, in part to gather oceanographic and weather data, but also to maintain control of a region where the ice is in constant flux, often drifting hundreds of yards an hour in unpredictable directions. The effort ended in 1991, when the 31st station was abandoned as the Soviet Union collapsed. Arctic scientists around the world lamented the loss of what many said was the longest nearly continuous effort to gather data in the central Arctic Ocean."
Revkin previously mourned the plight of post-Soviet Polar bears: “The Soviet Union outlawed polar bear hunting in 1956, but since the fall of Communism, illegal shooting has steadily risen, experts say.”
For the rest of Revkin's story, click here.
• Arctic | Communism | Andrew Revkin
Frank Rich's Conflicting "Passions"
The March 4 edition of the MSNBC talk show "Hardball" featured a debate on Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" between NYT's editor-turned-columnist Frank Rich and the Washington Times Tony
Blankley.
According to a show transcript, Blankley defended the movie's tone: "This is not a movie made for the purposes of entertainment. It is clearly a movie to reach out to people of a common religious faith and strengthen their faith. And what is extraordinary are the number of people who are coming to experience this. This is like building a cathedral and having people come. And I agree that the style is sort of Catholic, baroque visual piety. It is not Protestant with a nice clean cross with nobody on it."
Rich responded with snark: "Tony, I hate to break it to you. This is Hollywood. This movie was made to make money. And, as you indicated, that's what it is doing."
But Rich seemed to have a different idea in his August 3 attack on "The Passion," predicting it would flop partly because it wasn't Hollywood enough: "Indeed, it's hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (possibly without benefit of subtitles)."
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org