A simple reflection

It has been a long time since I have written in this space, and the reasons for that vary, but I am going to return on occasion now because there are reflections that need to be made and this is the only good place for me to make them.   The one important change that must be noted before all else is that I am now married.  I note it because that development colors everything from now on . . . and I could not be more happy about it.  Now, on to the legal reflection.

Tony Mauro, a correspondent for Legal Times, highlights a criminal case from this term at the U.S. Supreme Court as a way to show the conservative-liberal divide on the Court.  I point it out to demonstrate the bias of its presentation.  If you took everything Mauro says at face value, you would think that the world is ending because the mean conservatives on the Court are changing the rules in order to stick it to criminals, the discriminated, the downtrodden and the rest.  But think about the case: A criminal defendant files a habeas corpus petition three days late according to the deadline provided in the published federal rules of criminal procedure.  He filed late because the trial judge gave him an incorrect deadline which the attorney did not bother to double-check.  So, the mean conservatives on the court rejected his habeas petition because such deadlines are jurisdictional and a judge has no power to alter the jurisdiction of the court. 

This is the correct outcome under both the jurisprudence of the Court and the rules, but that does not stop Justice Souter from whining about the fact that the Court does not cut this criminal a break and make an exception.  Yet, especially in the criminal setting, one exception will be exploited by thousands, and before long it is not an exception at all but its own rule.  The rules exist to be followed, whether you miss a deadline by one day or a thousand.  That isn’t mean: it is called the law.

 

Bernstein Bellows

Throwing any semblance of objectivity to the wind, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame writes a lengthy essay in Vanity Fair calling for an immediate and wide-ranging congressional investigation into the Bush administration with an eye toward at least censuring and probably impeaching him. Drawing numerous questionable parallels between the Bush White House and Richard Nixon’s presidency, Bernstein labels President Bush “incompetent,” a “prevaricator,” and the author of “the most disastrous five years of decision-making of any modern American presidency.” Playing political guru, Bernstein even makes the absurd claim that Republicans agreeing to investigate Bush before November would actually help their electoral chances.

I cannot even begin to deconstruct how ridiculous this piece of drivel actually is. It essentially amounts to nothing more than a liberal diatribe couched as a serious political essay. The major problem with that is that Bernstein is not even a political analyst; he is a reporter who spent his entire life simply gathering facts for stories. Apparently we are supposed to believe that he is qualified to render an opinion on whether a congressional investigation is actually warranted simply because he investigated the Watergate affair. Reporting on Watergate does not make you a political genius, particularly when it is blatantly obvious that the parallels between the two are non-existent here. There has been no cover-up, no hatchet jobs, no deliberate breaking of the law to get back at political opponents.

But where Bernstein’s analysis becomes laughable is when he starts to ascribe characteristics to the Bush White House that actually belonged to the Clinton team. For instance, he says that Bush has an “Orwellian reliance on the meaninglessness of words.” If ever there was an acute description of Bill Clinton in the White House it is that one considering he is the man who told prosecutors that whether he lied was a question of what the definition of the word “is” is. Clinton possessed almost a pathological need to bend the truth to suit particular situations.

Bush, on the other hand, has been upfront about what the administration is doing—including why the country was going to war in Iraq—except when revealing information would amount to a breach in national security. There have been times when the information the administration has provided has later been shown to be inaccurate, but that is a matter of poor intelligence gathering, not truth-telling.

For an investigative reporter, Bernstein has not delved very deeply into the facts on this front. Instead he simply adopts the radical Lefist line about Bush’s presidency being worse than Nixon’s, which apparently proves of itself that the administration should be investigated. Bernstein would be much more believable and helpful if he did not overstate his case. Plausible arguments can be made that the Bush White House has made mistakes—even some major ones—over the past five years, and accountings should always be made of public servants for mistakes. But it is absurd to expect error-free leadership any more than one should expect perfection from the rest of the American people.

The bar must be set well above the line that a certain segment of the population does not like the President’s politics and so they attribute every evil under the sun to his administration. Otherwise, every time an election is won and lost we will be engaged in perpetual political war. The liberals need to let go: they lost in 2004 pure and simple. They will have another chance this Fall and in 2008. Carping about supposed Watergate-like corruption will not get them any closer to respectability . . . or the White House.

 

Judging a gesture

The Boston Herald continues to stir a tempest in a teapot over a gesture Justice Scalia made after Red Mass two Sundays ago, with the paper continuing to claim that the gesture was obscene and so was an Italian saying uttered by the Justice.  The Herald now reports that Peter Smith, the freelance photojournalist that somehow managed to take a picture of Scalia making the gesture, has been fired by the Catholic weekly The Pilot for releasing the photo to the Herald.

“Gesture-gate” is a quintessential example of a liberal media outlet manufacturing a story to pester a conservative it despises.  Regardless of what the word and gesture really mean—and it seems fairly clear that Scalia was joking around—the fact is that this simply is not a story worth a whole week’s worth of press or making a martyr out of the journalist who took the photo.  So Justice Scalia does not care about what his critics say concerning his positions on religious issues.  Does that surprise anyone?  More importantly, should he care what his critics say?  It is his job to interpret the law, not take opinion polls and vote accordingly.  He can leave the pulse-taking to fellow Justice Stephen Breyer, who does not really know what he thinks on religion issues.

Beyond that, it seems that at least a couple of basic points have been lost in the fray.  First, if the reporters really felt the need to be at the Red Mass—and its newsworthiness seems questionable given that Justice Scalia attends them all the time—the least they could have done is waited until he was outside the church premises to ask any questions.  This likely would have lessened any confrontational aspect to the inquiry.

Second, the question asked by the reporter was quite frankly stupid.  The Herald reporter asked Scalia what he has to say to critics who question his impartiality on matters of church and state.  To ask the justice such a question as he is walking out of church is blatantly and unnecessarily confrontational.  It is as if the reporter was questioning Scalia’s right to go to church in the first place because doing so may somehow compromise his “impartiality.”  Moreover, the question assumes Scalia is not impartial on such matters.

Finally, it seems clear that the Herald took Scalia’s response as a personal affront, labeling his behavior “unjustice-like” and writing follow-up stories all week long to perpetuate it.  It is ironic that the Herald reporter was questioning Scalia’s impartiality and yet the paper illustrated its own bias through its reaction to Scalia’s response.  Reporters are supposed to be business-like, report the facts, and not become personally offended because the news is about the story, not about them.  Unfortunately, today reporters and MSM outlets seem to have forgotten this and are more interested in pushing their own agenda than reporting the news.  They actually believe they are bigger than the news they report.  This pride has come back to haunt them on more than one occasion and it is a major reason for the growth of alternative media outlets.  It seems obvious that the Herald, at least, has not learned any lessons from the decline of the MSM.

 

Loss of credentials

Middle Tennessee State University is set to host a conference on the credibility crisis in the MSM.  Major participants in the conference will include former Vice President Al Gore and Washington Post editor Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame.  Conference leaders suggest that the main damage in credibility has been caused by the likes of The New York Times’ Jayson Blair, who made up stories, USA Today’s Jack Kelly, who invented sources and quotes, and the unwise use of confidential sources, such as in the CBS “Memogate” scandal.  While these incidents have no doubt injured MSM credibility, it seems that the conference will avoid the most obvious source of lost credibility: media bias.

Alternative media outlets freely admit their biases and allow readers to take that into account when assessing information from those sources.  Mainstream media outlets like CBS News and The New York Times still cling to the absurd veneer of unbiased reporting when the public knows better.  The liberal biases of the MSM are as obvious as the nose on a person’s face, yet these media outlets continue to insult the intelligence of the public by pretending they simply report the news.  Until they own up to their blatant slanting, the public will continue to look at the MSM with a skeptical eye and seek alternative outlets to get their information.

 

All the liberal news that’s fit to print

The major news media outlets in America display persistent liberal bias. That is the conclusion of a three-year study by political science professors from UCLA and the University of Missouri. The most liberal outlet is the news section of The Wall Street Journal, which was determined to be more left-leaning than even the “CBS Evening News,� The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. The only outlets found to be conservative among those evaluated were The Washington Times and Fox News’s “Special Report with Brit Hume.� Now that statistical proof confirms what most people have known for years, one hopes the news media will finally admit its bias or do something about it.

The most amazing thing about this study is not its findings, but the fact that it took three years to produce such obvious results.  One point seemingly overlooked about the study—despite its authors’ discussion about going to great lengths to ensure non-partisan results—is that the study itself is slightly flawed.  The study used the voting scorecard of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) as its baseline to determine which media outlets are liberal and which are conservative.  This method works well if one is simply attempting to determine if certain media outlets can be categorized as liberal, but it does not give an accurate picture of how liberal these media sources actually are. 

To understand why this is the case, all that one needs to do is think of the political spectrum like a kind of measuring stick in which “zero� represents the middle ground between liberal and conservative views.  Several marks to the right of zero is the designated “conservative� position and the same number of marks to the left of zero is the designated “liberal� end of the spectrum.  The study in question does not measure the politics of the news media outlets by starting at zero because the ADA is already admitted to be a liberal organization with liberal goals.  Therefore, the study starts its measurements at least a few marks to the left of zero, at the “new zero.�  The New York Times, the L.A. Times, and others are several marks to the left of the “new zero� and are labeled liberal in the study, while The Washington Times is found to be to the right of the “new zero� and labeled conservative.  It is because of this measuring system that the study concludes that outlets like NPR and Time magazine are liberal but not strongly so.  Perhaps these outlets do not meet all of the goals of the ADA, but given how extremely liberal an outlet that supported every single part of the ADA agenda would be, these outlets should be considered very liberal. 

It could be argued that this “new zero” approach is necessary because achieving a perfectly neutral baseline is not possible.  I am sympathetic to such an argument so long as recognition of the drawbacks to starting several spaces to the left of the neutral position is admitted.  Perhaps these drawbacks are noted in the actual study, but no such weakness is mentioned in the press release about the study. 

Flaws aside, it is nice to see more statistical backing for the fact that the news media is notoriously liberal.  Bernard Goldberg was lambasted by his former cohorts when he first made this observation in his book Bias, John Stossel was excoriated a couple of years later when he made the same charge, and other lesser-known media-types have been on the receiving end of similar rough criticisms.  Studies such as this one bring some measure of vindication to those who have taken such stands.  All that can be done to change the media culture is to keep throwing the evidence in their faces over and over until they decide that credibility is more important that political achievements.  Granted, the profession may never reach that point, but the elusiveness of a goal should not determine whether it is right to try and attain it.

 

Wayward Woodward

Liberals can be so fickle about their icons.  Recently, after lauding New York Times reporter Judith Miller as a First Amendment saint, the Left turned on her, claiming that she had been too supportive of the the Iraq war in her reporting and “uncontrollable” as a reporter.  Last week the Left’s love affair with Miller officially ended when she resigned from the Times.  Now liberals have turned their wrath on none other than the dean of liberal journalism, Bob Woodward.  That’s right, the man who helped bring down Richard Nixon is falling from the good graces of the Left because he has all but blown up the CIA leak case against Dick Cheney’s former right-hand man “Scooter” Libby and he has proclaimed on several occasions that he finds the investigation and the conspiracy supposedly concocted by the White House to retaliate against former Amb. Joe Wilson to be ridiculous.  This just demonstrates how far the hatred for Bush goes in Leftist circles.  Woodward has done work they loved for years, yet as soon as he does one thing that could be perceived as helping the White House, the liberals eviscerate him.  As they say, with friends like these . . . .

 

You were the chosen one!

Mike Wallace, the icon of CBS’s 60 Minutes, is nearing the end of his career and is hawking a new book, Between You and Me.  His son, Chris Wallace, who is also a reporter, interviewed his father about the book, his interview style, and other topics.  Shining through in the interview is the elder Wallace’s obvious annoyance at his son’s hinting that the mainstream media is biased and his apparent distain for the news organization for whom his son works.  Imagine the irony for the legendary reporter of the most liberal news show on television having a son who follows in his footsteps by becoming a reporter . . . but who works for Fox News.  I wonder if Mr. Wallace would say he knows what Obi-Wan felt like when Anikan joined the Dark Side.

 

Mixing up the media

Media Matters, a self-described “progressive” organization dedicated to “correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” explains in detail why news reports describing Judge Alito’s record in abortion cases as “mixed” are not accurate. There is a double irony here: first that a liberal media watchdog group accuses such media outlets as ABC News, CNN, and USA Today of conservative bias; and second, that a liberal media group does a better job of making the conservative case for Alito than most conservative voices.