@jayrosen_nyu
Outstanding critique of how Supreme Court reporters conceive of their job by @Dahlialithwick, who writes about the Court for @Slate.
Come for the boiling frustration at outdated routines. Stay for the icy calm in her analysis of where it’s all going.
“Repeating manufactured narratives with which the court will eventually manufacture legal doctrine serves the court’s interest. The problem is that it does not serve the interests of the public, and that’s whom journalists are supposed to be writing for. Unfortunately, we somehow did not learn the lesson the public was forced to learn during the Trump years—that just because there’s a red brief and a blue brief, this doesn’t by necessity mean that there are two legitimate, fact-based sides to an issue to which we must impute good faith. There isn’t always some reasonable compromise to be found in the middle. Watchdog groups have proved that a good number of those briefs were bought and paid for by big money, riddled with bad science, and driven by an Overton window theory of the law. We have enabled the Overton window by forgetting that the story of what happened to the Supreme Court on Mitch McConnell’s watch is as much a Supreme Court story as the manufactured narrative of 303 Creative—even if there will never be a 6–3 decision handed down about it.”
Imagine if the Press Covered the Supreme Court Like Congress
You can’t, can you?
You can write that the Supreme Court is delegitimizing itself only so many times before you’ve made yourself ridiculous. If the high court is not in fact behaving in a fashion that makes its decisions respected, the real question is: Why are we all zealously watching and reporting on its decisions as though they are immutable legal truths? Why are we scientifically analyzing every case that comes down as if it holds value? The obvious answer is that these decisions have real consequences—something the past year has showed us far too graphically. But if the Supreme Court is no longer functioning as a real “court,” why are we mostly still treating its output as if it were simply the “law”?