File under "the insidiated press"

Last weekend, "Scalito"1 visited the National Italian-American Foundation gala. As he is wont to do, Scalia opened his mouth, and out poured the following observation:

"The press is never going to report judicial opinions accurately[,] ... [t]hey're just going to report, who is the plaintiff? Was that a nice little old lady? And who is the defendant? Was this, you know, some scuzzy guy? And who won? Was it the good guy that won or the bad guy?

[T]hat's all you're going to get in a press report, and you can't blame them, you can't blame them [the media]. Because nobody would read it if you went into the details of the law that the court has to resolve.

That's the Washinton Post, printing an AP report, but don't click that link just yet - stay with me a moment.

Well, that sounds pretty reasonable, right? He's not criticizing the media so much as he's saying that the business that the media are in is not conducive to detailed reporting of legal minutiae. He's saying that court reporting in the MSM will always be truncated, that it will be summarized, and that this process inevitably tends to skim over the finer points. Which I think we all know is completely inaccurate, given how CBS News dedicates most of its show when the court is in session to read the Court's opinion in major tax law cases verbatim, right? And in fact, Scalia made the same point last year in a panel debate with Justices O'Connor and Breyer that was carried on CSPAN, in connection with the cameras in cout debate. His point there, very much like here, was that the news media will inevitably take only soundbites from the available coverage of the court, and even if they aren't really trying to misrepresent the court, the very nature of the industry, the format and the audience will naturally tend to ill-serve the accurate reporting of the law.

So at the very least, this is a reasonable contention that the modern media is not what one might consider to be ruthlessly detail-oriented, and given to lengthy, in-depth analysis of legally meaningful topics considered to be arcana at best by the general public.2

Wanna know how the AP wants its readers to go into that paragraph?

"Scalia expressed disdain for the news media and the general reading public, and suggested that together they condone inaccurate portrayals of federal judges and courts." That's the statement with which AP writer "John Heilprin" prefaces the foregoing quote. And of course, when you read the quote without that misleading introduction, it's obvious that Scalia did no such thing; he didn't express "disdain," he made an emminently reasonable and accurate statement about the modern news cycle. But that's sure not how AP - and the WaPo - want the casual reader to see it.

Has the AP given up on subtle bias and resorted to outright character assasination?

Post facto:
Federalist Society Student Symposium '08: "the people and the courts" (3/11/08)

1. 1. David Lat is attempting to imbue the term with new life for occaisions when Scalia and Alito attend events together, a la "Bennifer" or "Brangelina," according to Lat. For reasons I can't fully comperehend, I feel vaguely relieved that I have no real idea what any of these terms mean.
2. 2. Try to remember the last time you saw a news report discussing whether the NSA program violated the law where the report was more specific about "the law" allegedly being broken than "FISA" - or in many cases, just "the law" in the abstract. Do not go looking for the term "50 U.S.C. §1802(a)(1)" in an MSM report on the NSA controversy.