If you happened to be watching a television news channel on May 26, the day President Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, you might have been struck, as I was, by what seemed like a nifty investigative report.
First came the happy announcement ceremony at the White House, with Sotomayor sweetly saluting her elderly mother, who as a single parent had raised the prospective justice and her brother in a Bronx housing project. Obama had chosen a woman whose life journey mirrored his own: an obscure, disadvantaged beginning followed by blazing academic excellence, an Ivy League law degree, and a swift rise to power. It was a moving TV moment, well-orchestrated and in perfect harmony with the central narrative of the new Obama presidency.
But then, just minutes later, journalism rose to perform its time-honored pie-throwing role. Having been placed by the president on a pedestal, Sotomayor was now a clear target. I happened to be watching Fox News. I was slated to appear that night on one of its programs, Hannity, to serve as a willing foil to the shows cheerfully pugnacious host, Sean Hannity, a man who can deliver a deeply held conservative conviction on any topic faster than the speed of thought. Since the host knew what the subject matter of that nights show would be and I did not, Id thought it best to check in and see what Fox was preoccupied with that afternoon.
With Sotomayor, of courseand the networks producers seemed amazingly well prepared. They showed a clip from remarks she had made on an obscure panel at Duke University in 2005, and then, reaching back still farther, they showed snippets from a speech she had made at Berkeley Law School in 2001. Here was this purportedly moderate Latina judge, appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president and now tapped for the Supreme Court by a Democratic one, unmasked as a Race Woman with an agenda. In one clip she announced herself as someone who believed her identity as a Latina woman (a redundancy, but thats what she said) made her judgment superior to that of a white male, and in the other she all but unmasked herself as a card-carrying member of the Left Wing Conspiracy to use Americas courts not just to apply and interpret the law but, in her own words, to make policy, to perform an end run around the other two branches of government and impose liberal social policies by fiat on an unsuspecting American public.
In the Duke clip, she not only stated that appellate judges make policy, she did so in a disdainful mock disavowal before a chuckling audience of apparently like-minded conspirators. I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we dont make law, I know, she said before being interrupted by laughter. Okay, I know. Im not promoting it, Im not advocating it, Im
you know, flipping her hands dismissively. More laughter.
Holy cow! Im an old reporter, and I know legwork when I see it. Those crack journalists at Fox, better known for coloring and commenting endlessly on the news than for actually breaking it, had unearthed not one but two explosive gems, and had been primed to expose Sotomayors darker purpose within minutes of her nomination! Leaving aside for the moment any question about the context of these seemingly damaging remarksnone was offeredI was impressed. In my newspaper years, I prepared my share of advance profiles of public figures, and I know the scut work that goes into sifting through a decades-long career. In the old days it meant digging through packets of yellowed clippings in the morgue, interviewing widely, searching for those moments of controversy or surprise that revealed something interesting about the subject. How many rulings, opinions, articles, legal arguments, panel discussions, and speeches had there been in the judges long years of service? What bloodhound producer at Fox News had waded into this haystack to find these two choice needles?
Then I flipped to MSNBC, and lo!
they had the exact same two clips. I flipped to CNN
same clips. CBS
same clips. ABC
same clips. Parsing Sotomayors 30 years of public legal work, somehow every TV network had come up with precisely the same moments! None bothered to say who had dug them up; none offered a smidgen of context. They all just accepted the apparent import of the clips, the substance of which was sure to trouble any fair-minded viewer. By the end of the day just about every American with a TV set had heard the make policy and Latina woman comments. By the end of the nightly news summaries, millions who had never heard of Sonia Sotomayor knew her not only as Obamas pick, but as a judge who felt superior by reason of her gender and ethnicity, and as a liberal activist determined to make policy from the federal bench. And wasnt it an extraordinary coincidence that all these great news organizations, functioning independentlybecause this, after all, is the advantage of having multiple news-gathering sources in a democracyhad come up with exactly the same material in advance?
They hadnt, of course. The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obamas list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance.
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But not just anything resonant. Richmonds overarching purpose was to damage Sotomayor, or at least to raise questions about her that would trouble his readers, who are mostly other conservative bloggers. On most days, he says, his stuff on Verum Serum is read by only 20 to 30 people. If any of them like what they see, they link to it or post the video on their own, larger Web sites.
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In both instances, Richmonds political bias made him tone-deaf to the context and import of Sotomayors remarks. Bear in mind that he was looking not simply to understand the judge, but to expose her supposed hidden agenda.
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I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The bloggers role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all news is unapologetically propaganda.
In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromiseonly innocence or degrees of guilt or responsibility. But isnt this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isnt there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isnt the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport.
Television loves this, because it is dramatic. Confrontation is all. And given the fragmentation of news on the Internet and on cable television, Americans increasingly choose to listen only to their own side of the argument, to bloggers and commentators who reinforce their convictions and paint the world only in acceptable, comfortable colors. Bloggers like Richmond and Sexton, and TV hosts like Hannity, preach only to the choir. Consumers of such news become all the more entrenched in their prejudices, and ever more hostile to those who disagree. The other side is no longer the honorable opposition, maybe partly right; but rather always wrong, stupid, criminal, even downright evil. Yet even in criminal courts, before assigning punishment, judges routinely order pre. .sentencing reports, which attempt to go beyond the clash of extremes in the courtroom to a more nuanced, disinterested assessment of a case. Usually someone who is neither prosecution nor defense is assigned to investigate. In a post-journalistic society, there is no disinterested voice. There are only the winning side and the losing side.
