Justices Say Nothing of Interest

I suppose Lauren Windsor got what she came for: attention. Other than that, she didn’t get much.

Windsor is the liberal Democratic activist who attended a gala for the Supreme Court Historical Society, posed as a religious conservative and secretly taped Justices John Roberts and Samual Alito along with Alito’s wife.

What they all said was unremarkable and if anything the headline should be that Martha Ann Alito confirmed that her husband had nothing to do with the silly flags she has flown from their homes — something Windsor’s fellow liberals have refused to accept.

For his part, Justice Alito sounds like a guy at a reception with a plate or hors d’ ouvres in his hand trying to get away from somebody he’d really rather not be talking to. His comments are innocuous. He’s trying to agree obliquely and be pleasant with someone who he believes likes him while eying the open bar and a second gin and tonic.

Martha Ann does present as a hard-right whack job, but last I checked she wasn’t a Supreme Court Justice. She’s a private citizen entitled to her opinions (and her privacy), such as they are.

Meanwhile the Chief Justice comes off as the decent, moderate-conservative he has always seemed to be. When Windsor tries to trick him into agreeing with her that this is a Christian nation, he says: “I don’t know that we live in a Christian nation. I know a lot of Jewish and Muslim friends who would say maybe not.” 

Aside from Mrs. Alito’s confirmation about the flag thing (which isn’t much of a story to begin with), there’s no story here. But that hasn’t stopped The New York Times, NPR and PBS from reporting the hell out of it. They should have treated it as the nonstory that it is. There was nothing new here, the recording was unethically obtained and they didn’t even demand to hear the entire recording before running with the story. This is bad journalism any way you look at it.

Aside from these news outlets, the only person who comes off really badly in all of this is Lauren Windsor. She secretly recorded her subjects. She presented herself as someone she’s not — she lied. She goaded her subjects into saying things she wanted on tape. Then she edited the tapes without providing the full recordings.

You might compare this to Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” recording. That was also recorded without her knowledge and so it was also obtained in an unethical manner. However, in that case Clinton made her comments of her own volition. She wasn’t lied to or goaded. And what she said was substantive because it revealed her contempt for a part of the population while her campaign slogan was “Better Together.”

In this case Alito said what we already know him to believe. You might not like what he believes. I don’t. But there is simply nothing new there.

And a postscript… New York Times columnist David Brooks had the same take on this when he was asked about it during his regular Friday analysis on the PBS News Hour: “Yes, well, listen, I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information. . . .”