Under the headline "Future Nominations Are at Stake in Hearing," New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Charlie Savage suggested that Sonia Sotomayor's nomination is a given; the real battle among partisans and legal activists is "to define the parameters of an acceptable nomination in case another seat opens up during Mr. Obama’s presidency." Interesting, then, to see what the parameters of debate are like in this report.

The Times solicits comments from five conservatives or Republicans--Rachel Brand, Fred McClure, James R. Copland, Manuel Miranda and Kenneth M. Duberstein. The Times also quoted one law professor with a liberal reputation who has been a forceful critic of Sotomayor (suggesting she was intellectually unqualified for the court), and Nan Aron "of the liberal Alliance for Justice."

The piece goes on to say, "Several legal experts said Judge Sotomayor’s testimony might make it harder for Mr. Obama to name a more liberal justice next time." Well, if you talk to that many right-wingers, you will hear that kind of thing quite a bit.

Number of stories in the Nexis news database dated today that mentioned Sen. Jeff Sessions' (R.-Ala.) questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, in which Sessions accused Sotomayor of harboring ethnic prejudices: 69

Number of such stories that recalled that Sessions was rejected as a judicial nominee in 1986 in part because of his approving remarks about the Ku Klux Klan: 2

This Associated Press story ("Debate Over Who Sotomayor Is a Sensitive One," 5/29/09) sure is confused. Luckily reporter Sharon Thiemer makes at least that much clear from the very start:

There are two sides to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: a Latina from a blue-collar family and a wealthy member of America's power elite.

The White House portrays Sotomayor as a living image of the American dream, though its telling of the rags-to-riches story emphasizes the rags, a more politically appealing narrative, and plays down the riches.

Yes, somehow the White House picked her despite the fact that she is no longer poor--and still pretended that she was the "living image of the American dream," which as we all know is to remain poor one's entire life.

That's not the end of it.  The AP also writes:

On ethnicity, Sotomayor herself has recognized--and contributed to--the dichotomy. She proudly highlights her Puerto Rican roots but hasn't always liked it when others have.

The evidence:

Yet years ago, during a recruiting dinner in law school at Yale, Sotomayor objected when a law firm partner asked whether she would have been admitted to the school if she weren't Puerto Rican, and whether law firms did a disservice by hiring minority students the firms know are unqualified and will ultimately be fired.

So she's proud of being Puerto Rican and she takes offense at the notion that she couldn't have gotten into Yale if she weren't? What a "dichotomy." The AP goes on to note that Sotomayor "won a formal apology from the firm."

We do learn, as well, that her brother is a doctor "whose practice doesn't accept Medicaid or Medicare-- programs for the poor and elderly--according to its website." Great--now her sibling isn't poor anymore, either?

The New York Times' front-page piece today (5/29/09) on Sonia Sotomayor's work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund is a good example of what is meant by "framing"--and a bad example of how it can distort a story.

The bulk of the story describes various cases that the group took on while Sotomayor was involved with it, which is interesting enough.  But making a case for the importance of the story (justifying its inclusion on Page 1?), writers Raymond Hernandez and David W. Chen write:

Ms. Sotomayor's involvement with the defense fund has so far received scant attention. But her critics, including some Republican senators who will vote on her nomination, have questioned whether she has let her ethnicity, life experiences and public advocacy creep into her decisions as a judge. It seems inevitable, then, that her tenure with the defense fund will be scrutinized during her confirmation hearings.

Now, if you take a look at Sotomayor's actual judicial record, one thing that leaps out is that she frequently comes down in rulings against the side that she would presumably sympathize with politically--for the "global gag rule", a racist cop and tobacco companies, for instance, and against a disabled black woman and African-American air travellers.  Either Sotomayor does have the ability to put aside her personal opinions when making a judgment, in other words, or she's a good deal more right-wing than most people believe.

But the lengthy article never allows anyone to make the case that Sotomayor does not, in fact, "let her ethnicity...creep into her decisions as a judge." Instead, after describing her involvement with the PRLDEF, Hernandez and Chen describe a single judicial case that Sotomayor ruled on--Ricci, in which she was one of three appeals court judges that upheld a ruling against a white firefighter's discrimination claim--and then concludes by quoting a right-wing judicial activist:

Mr. Levey said that the employment discrimination case filed by the defense fund on behalf of Hispanic police officers raised questions about Judge Sotomayor’s credibility in the New Haven case. "It adds to the conviction that this was not accidental, and that she had a very specific agenda here."

In short, the New York Times frames its look at Sotomayor's involvement in Puerto Rican legal affairs as a question of whether such involvement will make her a bad judge, and it allows no one to offer the case to the contrary.  Is that accidental--or does the Times have a very specific agenda here?

Charlie Savage did some good reporting on the Bush signing statements, but  his front-page story in today's New York Times on reproductive rights groups' reaction to Sotomayor is way off course. His lead explains that abortion rights advocates are worried about Sotomayor, because "when she has written opinions that touched tangentially on abortion disputes, she has reached outcomes in some cases that were favorable to abortion opponents."

OK, so what are those opinions? Here's what he names: She ruled in favor of the Bush administration's reinstatement of the global gag rule; she ruled that anti-abortion protesters could take police to court for allegedly using excessive force to break up one of their demonstrations; and she's ruled in a few cases in favor of Chinese refugees seeking asylum because of China's forced abortion policies.

Now, who's uneasy about these? I've looked around, and the only one cited by any reproductive rights groups I've seen is the first--it was a case brought by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (now the Center for Reproductive Rights)--though I've also seen other reproductive rights advocates say it was a narrow ruling based pretty clearly on precedent and not something that would threaten Roe. The second one I haven't seen mentioned --it would seem to be about abusive police conduct rather than reproductive rights, anyway, so it's not really clear why it should be included here.

But the third category is just absurd. Those are pro-reproductive rights rulings that no reproductive rights group I've heard of is protesting (and it would be frankly bizarre and troubling if they were). He even quotes an anti-choice activist saying basically as much, though in a much more pejorative way: "even 'the most radical feminist' would object to forcing women to abort wanted pregnancies."

So why were those seemingly unrelated cases included in the piece? It seems Savage got most of the material for this article--an article about reproductive rights groups' reactions to Sotomayor, remember--from a religious anti-choice group's website. And as far as one can tell from reading the article, the only people he actually spoke to were two anti-choice advocates. That's a mighty odd way to write about reproductive rights backers' feelings on the subject. Since part of the way the anti-choice movement works to chip away support of reproductive rights is to falsely frame advocates as "pro-abortion," Savage plays right into their hands, making that association for them on the front page of the New York Times.

It does seem that some reproductive rights groups are concerned about Sotomayor's position on Roe v. Wade, since that hasn't been spelled out yet. If you're going to write about that, here's a much more logical (and responsible) way to do it--talking to reproductive rights groups in order to frame your story about what their concerns are, rather than using their opponents' talking points to conjure up false arguments.

Politico's Mike Allen writes (5/27/09)

The media's left-of-center bias is rarely more apparent than during court fights. The coverage running up to the pick was slanted heavily toward the notion of how "pragmatic" Obama's legal views are and how unlikely he was to pick a liberal.

So coverage of Supreme Court fights is one of the best illustrations of corporate media's supposed lean to the left? Only three of the current justices had what could be described as a "fight" over their confirmation: Clarence Thomas (confirmed by a vote of 52-48), John Roberts (78-22) and Samuel Alito (58-42); all the others were confirmed with less than 10 percent of the Senate voting against them.

Despite the allegations of sexual harassment that were leveled against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, media coverage at the time depicted him as highly credible in his denials (Extra!, Special Issue 1992), and generally treated the question of whom to believe as impossible to answer.

Roberts got intensely favorable coverage from corporate media, to the point where Newsweek was denouncing as "conspiracy theories"  accurate characterizations of Roberts' record (FAIR Action Alert, 8/2/05). When the pro-choice group NARAL pointed out that Roberts had filed a brief in support of an abortion clinic blockader who had previously been convicted of bombing, this was widely denounced in the media as out of bounds (Extra!, 11-12/05); can anyone seriously imagine establishment pundits chiding right-wing activists for bringing up legal work Sonia Sotomayor had done on behalf of bombmakers?

With Alito as well, corporate media tended to treat his unflappable demeanor as more important than his legal views, giving him generally high marks for his confirmation performance (CounterSpin, 1/20/06).

The only Supreme Court nominee to be voted down by the Senate in modern times was Robert Bork. That was in 1987, when FAIR was just getting started, so we don't have any contemporaneous analysis of the coverage of that fight--but corporate media have subsequently created an entirely inaccurate mythology about Bork's unfair treatment (FAIR Media Advisory, 7/21/05; Extra! Update, 4/99).

Allen says that it's during such episodes that corporate media's left-leaning bias is most apparent. What's actually apparent is that charges of left-wing media bias never need to be accompanied by actual evidence.