The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Sober Second Thoughts

Dunno, Emily ... I, for one, am glad that Ed Whelan at NRO has outed us as raging drunks.

To me, the remarkable aspect of the assault on Greenhouse is—as you point out—that she warrants such extra-special crazy-ass contempt from the right wing. She’s not just “biased,” in Whelan’s latest. She’s also “sloppy.” It speaks to the impossible high-wire act still attempted by the Supreme Court press corps. They strive to be absolutely factual even while some of the best reporters on the beat have about 30 years’ experience and the political opinions that come with that. Long after the rest of the journalistic world chucked the illusion of objectivity to settle for the hope of accuracy, the folks on the SCOTUS beat still struggle mightily to hide their opinions each day. Some succeed better than others. I succeed not at all. And, of course, all of them slip up once in a while because the line between fact and opinion is murky. But Greenhouse is held to a different standard because the political right thinks she has this magical ability to alter the course of constitutional history with a quirk of her eyebrow toward the bench.

What. Ever.

Most interesting to me about Whelan’s latest crusade—er, noble truth-seeking enterprise—is that it does highlight the impossibility of what most SCOTUS reporters are trying to do: Perfect objectivity in Supreme Court reporting is a laudable goal. But unless we just reprint the transcript, we are all of us offering interpretations and impressions. That’s the expertise we get paid for. Interesting, also, is the fact that the convention is eroding on its own. Both Jeff Toobin and Jan Crawford Greenburg produced excellent books about the court last year that sidestepped objectivity for opinion and point of view. Yet nobody is calling for their scalps. In fact, most of us found their candor pretty refreshing. I am not sure whether anyone would contend that Jan’s book is objective while Jeff''s is not, or vice versa. I certainly didn’t hear rants about deliberate bias and dishonesty. Most of us simply recognized in those books the truth that different legal reporters hold different opinions, that it may be impossible to conceal them anymore, and that this may be a good thing.