Alito: What the WaPo Doesn't Get

The Washington Post's ongoing attempts to spin reality as a neutral thing - when actually, as Steven Colbert says, "the facts are biased" - now extends to their coverage of Samuel Alito.  Their piece on the Post's own analysis of Alito's past rulings was headed "Alito:  In and Out of the Mainstream," with the sub-heading "In Analysis, Nominee Defies Portrayals By Left and Right." 

The problem?  The study clearly shows three areas where Alito is significantly outside the mainstream.  While it suggests there are other areas where he is not, that's hardly the point.   For an (admittedly extreme) example - John Wayne Gacy may have been a typical clown, but his social behavior with children was not.  That does not place him "in and out of the mainstream." 

It's also important to note that Supreme Court justices are not bound by precedent:  they establish it.  That means that any nominee's tendency to act outside the mainstream is likely to be amplified once on the Court.   Is Alito "in" or "outside" the mainstream?  Let's look at the WaPo's own words:

... a closer look finds that he dissents most often in areas where his views are least typical of the average judge: cases in which he has favored religion and largely sided against immigrants and one group of convicted criminals: prisoners facing the death penalty.

So he's outside the mainstream of American judicial thought - including that of his fellow Republican appointees - in three key areas:  favoring religion, hostility toward immigrants, and the death penalty.  And that's under the limitations of precedent that define his past rulings.

To look at how he would act on the Supreme Court, it's necessary to look at his past judicial behavior - which the WaPo agrees is out of the norm in three major areas - and add to that his writings and extrajudicial actions.   Those, including his  right-wing memo-writing in the Reagan Administration and his membership in an extremist Princeton group, provide a fuller picture of his thought and probable actions on the Court.

Now, before Howard Kurtz flames me again, let me say that I understand that the subject of this piece is the new analysis, not Alito's entire history.  But the header's statement that his actions "defy portrayals by left and right" - and the statement that "neither characterization (by Democrats or Republicans) is completely accurate," are overly broad (in that they don't limit themselves to the study at hand).  And, they are false.  In fact, the analysis actually contradicts these WaPo assertions. 

It's another example of spinning objective data as 'neutral' when, in fact, it clearly points in an entirely non-neutral direction.  It's the overthrow of objective reporting in order to appear objective.   And isn't that what the MSM's been doing for years?

Comments

[rose]

There you go.

John Wayne Gacy, in and out of the mainstream, and your nightmares, just like Alito.

[Ellen Dana Nagler]

I maintain that the headline writers do more distorting than the bylined authors. I once started a project to compare headlines on the same subject matter in the L.A. Times, the NYT and the WaPo. As far as I got, which wasn't very far, the L.A. Times heads most accurately reflected the substance of the story beneath. Neither the NYT nor the WaPo were "fair and balanced" in their headlines.

Imagine that there are people out there who get their sense of important stories only from scanning headlines. It could explain a lot.