This week seems to be rife with journalistic malpractice from outlets either running with leaked and unsubstantiated material that tries and fails to put Trump administration officials in a bad light or works to erode and undermine our nation’s institutional bodies of governance.
The latest installment from The New York Times involves leaked memos from the United States Supreme Court, verified by more anonymous sources.
The Times spoke to 10 people, liberals and conservatives, who were familiar with the deliberations over the pivotal emergency order and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because confidentiality was a condition of their employment.
Amazing how one can fail so spectacularly on this basic tenet of integrity. God help us.
The papers expose what critics have called the weakness at the heart of the shadow docket: an absence of the kind of rigorous debate that the justices devote to their normal cases.
After obtaining the papers, The Times confirmed their authenticity with several people familiar with the deliberations and shared them with a spokeswoman for the court. The Times posed detailed questions to the justices who wrote the memos; they did not respond.
Nor should they.
As RedState reported in February, Chief Justice Roberts took action to secure the integrity of the court’s processes after the 2022 leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Two months later, if this latest tranche of leaked memos is any indication, it hasn’t worked. Between justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly criticizing their constitutionalist colleagues, and the legacy media’s breathlessly publishing unsourced and leaked material, soon there will not be a Supreme Court left to preserve.
Hellbound and Down 