Slate Magazine
•75% Informative
The Supreme Court press corps has been institutionalized to treat anything the court produces as the “law,” and to push everything else off to be handled by the political press.
Reporters assigned there rarely venture beyond oral arguments, briefs and decisions.
With the notable exception of Politico’s Josh Gerstein, who co-reported the Dobbs leak last year, virtually all of the scoops about Clarence Thomas’ ethical breaches came from investigative reporters.
David Gergen: It's a truism that if the court’s job is to emphatically say what the law is, then it’re the job of the beat reporters to write it down and explain what it means to the public.
Gergen says the court should not be a national news story when a Justice says something snappy that goes viral at arguments.
He says the best time to pay attention is not just during the last two weeks in June, but this is how the court has been covered historically.
If reporting on the court doesn’t include probing into who is on it, how they got there, where little baby cases are hatched and who pays for their progress through the system, we are doing half our jobs.
What would we do if we stopped covering SCOTUS the way we have for the two decades I've been at this?.
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