December 13, 2005

Stuart Taylor, Jr. on Alito press coverage

You'll need to click the link fairly quickly, since National Journal will be rotating it off soon, but centrist columnist Stuart Taylor, Jr. has another hard-hitting column on the unfairness of some sections of the media toward nominee Sam Alito. Taylor's catalogue of reporters' "factual distortions, tendentious wording, and uncritical parroting of misleading attacks by liberal critics" not surprisingly begins with the already notorious Knight-Ridder piece in which, according to reporter Stephen Henderson, "we didn't find a single case in which Judge Alito sided with African-Americans ... [who were] alleging racial bias." (In fact there have been at least seven such cases, Taylor says.) Taylor isn't kind to the rest of the 2,652-word article by Henderson and Howard Mintz either ("illiterate statistical analysis and loaded language ...highly misleading...systematic slanting"). The Washington Post, Boston Globe and New York Times come in for a drubbing too, not to mention "the consistently mindless liberal hysteria of the New York Times' editorial page". This is Taylor's third column on the Alito nomination; if the link no longer works, Michael J. Gaynor at Conservative Voice has some highlights.

Relatedly, T.R. Goldman at Legal Times reports:
With Senate Democrats clearly outnumbered, liberal interest groups are staking their campaign against Samuel Alito Jr. on a simple strategy: Transform Alito into Robert Bork by any means possible — whether the shoe fits or not.
(cross-posted at Point of Law).