Recently we have seen the fabrication of false quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh, and swallowed hook, line, and sinker by those in the media who are predisposed to believe him a raving racist. That sort of thing has, unfortunately, become not quite common but also far from rare, as the line between incompetence and partisan maliciousness has become almost indistinguishable across the media landscape.
Today Hans Bader provided another dramatic example.
Liberals are busy Twittering each other with the false claim that Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, said that he would have voted to uphold school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
There’s just one problem: he never said any such thing. He said the very opposite! (Scalia has long agreed with the Supreme Court ruling banning segregation).
A liberal reporter for Capitol Media Services, Howard Fischer, made the claim that Scalia said he would have voted to uphold segregation, in a story carried in the East Valley Tribune. But as even liberal law professor Jack Balkin, who was initially fooled by the story, now admits, it’s pure bunk: a video recording of the event shows that Scalia actually said he would have voted to strike down segregation.
Before the error was uncovered, the story circulated all around the internet, including at CQ Politics’ Political Wire, and as a result, we can expect to see the false claim repeated for weeks in the press. (Political Wire, for example, contains a commentary by Taegan Doddard entitled, “Scalia Would Have Voted to Keep School Segregation“).
UPDATE, Oct. 27, 4:12 p.m.: the reporter who made the false claim about Scalia (Howard Fischer) has now deleted his claim that Scalia would uphold segregation from the online version of his story, tacitly admitting that he was wrong. But he did not disclose the error in his original story for readers.
SECOND UPDATE, Oct. 27, 6:22 p.m.: The erroneous story’s internet version has now been revised to contain a vague reference to its error, in a passage that reads:
“Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a story that was originally posted Oct. 26. It removes an incorrect reference to Brown v. Board of Education in the initial version.”
It may remove the, er, “incorrect reference,” but it doesn’t acknowledge, much less apologize for, what was either defamation or incompetence.
Read Bader’s whole piece, since it provides a number of other examples “of reporting [that] is typical for liberal court reporters, who routinely make false claims that make conservatives or businesses look bad or politically-correct constituencies look good.”
