Supreme Court Media Coverage Silences Legitimate Debate

This is an opinion from the Center. 

When the Supreme Court announces its decisions, political tailwinds understandably follow. Each decision is binary in nature, and this year’s docket saw disappointments for both the left and the right. 

But political reactions, displayed by media outlets on both sides, send a striking message about the state of American discourse. Sharp rebukes of certain decisions are normal elements of healthy debate — even though the Court is not beholden to public opinion. But much criticism has drifted from ideological disagreement to the twisting of decisions to foment partisan outrage.

The American media has a responsibility to accurately represent the true nature of each opinion included in a given decision. Framing a story through one opinion — or, worse yet, through none of them — feeds into un-American forces of anti-intellectualism that foment partisan outrage and undermine the ideals established 250 years ago. 

Rastafarian’s right to sue reveals sensationalism bias

One striking example of sensationalism bias came from a lesser-discussed decision. In Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, a Rastafarian man asked the court to rule on his right to sue individual corrections officers who violated his religious freedom in prison by cutting off his dreadlocks. Rastafarians grow their hair out as a sacred expression of faith.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion judged that the man did not have the right to sue under the specific federal statute at hand. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion, meanwhile, rejected the conservative majority’s contract-based reasoning and wrote that their “decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined.” 

But some media outlets on the left framed the decision as a blow to religious freedom, rather than an interpretation of a federal statute. ABC News (Lean Left bias), for example, ran a headline reading “Supreme Court denies Rastafarian's lawsuit after he was forcibly shaved bald behind bars.” Although ABC noted Justice Gorsuch’s argument in the body of its article, the tone of the coverage exhibits negativity and sensationalism biases.

Similarly, the New York Times (Lean Left), prior to explaining Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, called the decision “a departure from a series of Supreme Court rulings in recent years that have repeatedly bolstered religious rights,” citing Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a recent case decided on First Amendment grounds. But Landor was not a First Amendment landmark like Kennedy; it was a decision regarding the nature of a specific federal statute involving the right to sue individual officers for a violation of religious freedom in state prison.

A casual reader — or even a politics junkie who doesn’t have the time or practice to read long SCOTUS opinions — may be tricked by the New York Times or ABC to believe that the Court’s conservative majority disregarded or reformulated the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. This subtle framing, even when paired with a technical explanation of the Court’s majority opinion, creates the perception that the Court is gutting civil liberties. 

Supreme Court justices may have political predilections, but they are not unreasonable, nor are they stupid. Justice Jackson’s dissent may be correct. Perhaps contract law is not the appropriate framing for this specific case. But did the Supreme Court really destroy religious freedom protections last week? No — it delivered an interpretation of a federal statute, and comparisons to landmark First Amendment cases are misleading. Melodramatic framing from outlets like ABC and the New York Times undermines the legitimacy of the judicial branch.

Birthright Citizenship evokes partisan ire from left and right 

This year’s most prominent case — Trump v. Barbara, which determined the future of birthright citizenship — has shown a similar attempt to delegitimize the Court from the right. Fox News (Right) headlined, “Supreme Court lambasted over 'destructive' and 'outrageous' birthright citizenship decision,” and wrote that Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett “sided with liberals.” The article did not discuss Justice Kavanaugh’s nuanced “concurrence in judgment” but fundamental disagreement with the majority until later in the piece.

Presenting the decision as liberal — despite the presence of three conservative justices in the majority — provoked critics on the right to, for example, call Justice Barrett a “traitor,” delegitimizing constitutional analysis in favor of partisanship. 

The Fox News article also cited a statement from Turning Point USA (Right) spokesperson Andrew Kolvet, who said “The Court has utterly and completely failed America.” This criticism of the Court as an institution sows partisan distrust. Worse still, it fails to recognize the legitimacy of difference of opinion. Six legal scholars’ analyses, spanning dozens of pages, are disregarded as traitorous because of difference of opinion.

Other critics have expressed that the decision should have been decided by a 9-0 majority. And while the Court’s majority was, I believe, correct in reading the 14th amendment literally rather than searching for the framers’ main focus where the language is clear, the conservative wing’s dissenting opinions are reasonable interpretations, especially regarding the semantics of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” 

Indeed, as law professor Michael Ramsey said in the New York Times, the conflicting opinions confirm that the issue is “a really serious substantive division not just among legal scholars but among justices that are coming out of the conservative legal movement.” The prominence of the debate suggests that both opinions are well within the realm of public reason. 

Partisanship endangers the Court

Sensationalized, slanted narratives lend themselves to prominent legal scholars, like UPenn Professor Kate Shaw, whose podcast has tens of thousands of Instagram followers, suggesting disregard for the independence of the judiciary in a New York Times (Left) opinion concerning two executive power-based cases. She wrote that Congress could consider dismantling the independence of the judiciary through “stripping the Supreme Court of the power to hear challenges to certain newly enacted laws” or “statutorily creating additional Supreme Court seats, then moving quickly to fill them with jurists who will not pursue the current court’s apparent goal of boundless power for both the president and itself.” 

Kolvet and Shaw have something in common: They both fail to recognize the validity of a different opinion. They both promote an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, and un-American perspective. 

Some historic decisions, like Dred Scott v. Sandford, have indeed been based on racism or other forms of discrimination rather than sound legal theory. This term’s decisions are not so. 

For example, the decision in the joint cases regarding transgender athletes saw the Court apply its “intermediate scrutiny” standard — a long-standing and sound legal theory applied to sex-based classifications and accepted by both liberal and conservative justices. But New York Times columnist M. Gessen framed the decision as the Court deciding transgender people don’t warrant protection, suggesting that the justices ruled on their prejudice against transgender people rather than their prejudice in favor of biological women. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson disagreed with the Court’s majority. You might too. But the ruling is not unreasonable or based on hatred, as Gessen would propose.

While the left and the right don’t agree on much, their mutual displeasure with some of the Court’s decisions this term have prompted similar attacks on judicial independence from both sides. As Alexander Hamilton outlined in Federalist 78 (1788), the judiciary must remain independent from partisan forces. The media has a responsibility — whether to American ideals or to intellectual fairness — to summarize each opinion fairly and clearly to the average American, who has neither the time nor the practice to read hundreds of pages of legal jargon.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence ought to remind Americans of our duty to critical inquiry. Rather than undermining the intellectual bases of our Constitution, let’s take up that mantle one article at a time.

Ian Rosenzweig is a Bias Research Assistant for AllSides. He has a Center bias.

This piece was reviewed and edited by News Analyst & Social Media Editor Malayna J. Bizier (Right) and Product Manager Evan Wagner (Lean Left).