The Media's Appalling Coverage of Sonia Sotomayor

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted June 5, 2009.

So did Time, The Economist, Congressional Quarterly, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post's Vincent Carroll, USA Today, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Pretty much every news outlet in the country followed the rule.

They all reported on the "Latina woman" quote. They all reported it was controversial. And they all failed to explain that Sotomayor was specifically discussing discrimination cases when she made the remark.

And that doesn't even take into account the dozens (hundreds?) of "Latina woman" mentions on TV last week that failed to provide any framework whatsoever. Instead, the quote was simply used as a springboard for conservatives to launch malicious attacks against the esteemed judge. (Select journalists who actually did include context last week included Hanna Rosin at the Double X blog XX factor, Mike Barnicle on MSNBC, and Westchester, New York, newspaper columnist Noreen O'Donnell.)

Given the near ubiquity of the press failing, it's hard for me to believe that it wasn't been done intentionally. I'm not into newsroom conspiracies, but it's just difficult to believe that among these elite, college-educated journalists, that virtually every one of them covering the Sotomayor story mysteriously forgot to provide even the slightest context for the "Latina woman" quote -- a single sentence from a speech given eight years ago. Having looked at this story from every angle, I can only conclude that the lack of context has been a conscious, deliberate decision by journalists to, in a sense, purposefully un-inform news consumers, which, of course, is the opposite of what journalism aspires to accomplish.

I don't see how reporters and editors working for some of the largest news media outlets in the country could, almost without exception, fail to include crucial context about the Sotomayor quote and have it be some sort of cross-country cosmic event. It just doesn't make sense. I think it's premeditated.

Why? Simple: The press has already penciled in weeks' worth, if not months' worth, of Supreme Court nomination coverage for this summer. Married to the idea that Senate hearings hold the promise of dissolving into the wild pie fights, like the raucous affairs that unfolded during the dramatic Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork showdowns, the Beltway press relentlessly hypes these stories even though, as more recent nominations have shown, the hearings themselves turn out to be wildly anticlimactic.

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