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 Nightline
Smears Scalia
Guilt by association taken to a ridiculous and illogical
extreme...
[by Roger
Aronoff] 2/2/06
Brian
Ross has had a reputation at ABC News of being a first-rate
investigative
reporter. But his unfair attack on Justice Antonin Scalia for
attending a judicial conference has not only damaged his own
reputation but backfired in a big way. Thanks to the Federalist
Society, which has explained in detail the circumstances surrounding
Scalia's attendance at the conference, the American people
now have a unique insight into the deceitful methods of a major
news organization and its star "investigative reporter."
Ross did
a Nightline
report that took Scalia to task for not attending the swearing-in
last September of Chief Justice John Roberts at the White House.
Making Scalia out to be an unethical lout, ABC said that Scalia
attended a conference in Colorado held by the Federalist Society,
where he played tennis and went fishing, and rubbed elbows
with unsavory characters. To make it seem as though Scalia
was hiding something, he was shown on hidden camera hitting
a tennis ball with his racket.
In fact,
the ABC broadcast was a deliberate distortion of the facts.
I had recently given
high marks to one of the first shows of the post-Ted
Koppel Nightline. But this was the new Nightline at its worst.
It had a little bit of everything: Guilt by association,
lack of context, omission of key facts, inconsistent labeling,
choice and presentation of interview subjects.
The story
singled out Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the most conservative
members of the high court, for going to conferences hosted
by outside groups and supposedly creating questions in the
public mind about who might influence their opinions on the
bench.
Near the
end of the report, host Cynthia McFadden asked, "Now, Brian,
there's no evidence, is there, that any of these freebies have
influenced any judge in rendering an opinion on the Supreme
Court?" Ross said that "it isn't just Justice Scalia. Justices
at all ends of the political spectrum take plenty of these
trips to lots of nice places, all paid for by somebody else." But
Ross never mentioned anything about this so-called "appearance" problem
affecting any one of the liberal justices until then, and he
did not name any.
He could
have done reports on how liberal Justices like former ACLU
general counsel Ruth Bader Ginsburg have attended judicial
conferences in Europe and have come away with a strange view
of how foreign law should guide them in interpreting the U.S.
Constitution. Like Scalia, Chief Justice John Roberts and Judge
Samuel Alito have both categorically rejected this approach
to deciding cases in U.S. courts.
Despite the
hidden camera, innuendo, and implication, there was nothing
unethical or improper in Scalia attending this conference in
Colorado, and no complaints were presented from those who heard
his presentation at the legal seminar. And that, not tennis
or fishing, was the main purpose of the trip.
As noted
by Brit Hume of Fox News, himself a former reporter for ABC
News, "The [Brian Ross] report mentioned only in passing that
Scalia taught a legal seminar while on the trip, then quoted
at some length New York University Law professor Stephen Gillers,
who said the whole thing was unethical. While Nightline identified
the Federalist Society as conservative, it characterized Gillers
only as an ethics expert. In fact, Gillers is a left-wing Scalia
critic who once described the prospect of Republican control
of both the White House and Congress as a 'nightmare.' As for
Scalia, that seminar he taught in Colorado was a 10-hour course
for more than 100 lawyers and law students, open to members
and non-members of the Federalist Society. He received no fee
for it."
Not only
that, but Scalia had long been committed to teaching the seminar,
while the timing of the Roberts swearing in was not known far
in advance.
The Federalist
Society had explained this to Nightline, and in a letter following
the show, it compared the Brian Ross report to CBS's Memogate
story because of its deceptive nature. The group said that "Rather
than taking a recreational trip with hours of tennis and going
fly-fishing, as ABC would have its viewers believe, Justice
Scalia was honoring an agreement made nearly a year in advance
with the Federalist Society to teach a serious scholarly program
to more than 100 lawyers from 38 states that required considerable
work and advance preparation. Prior to the course, Justice
Scalia produced a 481-page course book that attendees were
expected to review in advance. The course was approved by at
least 30 state bars for most of the attending lawyers' continuing
education requirements. Justice Scalia was there to share his
knowledge and experience and received only reimbursement for
travel and lodging."
Ross had
reported that ABC spotted Scalia "speaking and socializing
with members of the group that paid the expenses for his trip," as
if he had been caught doing something wrong. Even more damaging,
Ross said that Scalia, while on this "Judicial Junket," had "attended
scheduled cocktail receptions, one of which was sponsored in
part by the same lobbying and law firm where convicted lobbyist
Jack Abramoff once worked."
That was
guilt by association taken to a ridiculous and illogical extreme.
Willing to
go to an ideological extreme as well, Ross featured more sound
bites from Steven Gillers, the left-wing law professor at New
York University and so-called "recognized scholar on legal
ethics." Nothing was said about his left-wing bent, although
a Google search easily finds his
articles in The Nation magazine, and a New York Times op-ed
piece urging John Kerry to pick Bill Clinton as his running
mate in 2004. It's no wonder he has it in for the conservative
Scalia.
His bias
was as easily identifiable as that of ABC in putting him on
the air in its hit piece on Scalia.
Nightline
has shot itself in the foot with this laughable report. Bring
back Ted Koppel. -one-
copyright
2006 Accuracy in Media
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