Charles Fried

Bozell Column: Ted Cruz Has All the Right Enemies
By Brent Bozell | May 7, 2013 | 11:37 PM EDT

The Washington Post offered a splashy profile of freshman Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday, and the most surprising thing about it was a lack of venom. The reporter described “the self-assured, nonstop talker who won national debate championships as an undergraduate at Princeton.”

Cruz “honed his reputation early in his career as a dazzling Supreme Court advocate” and now “has bashed into the national conversation,” most notably in attacking establishment Republicans who’ve called him and other young Senate conservatives “wacko birds.”

Elizabeth Warren Listed as Minority in Self-Reported Professional Directory for Nearly Decade Before Harvard Hired Her
By Jack Coleman | April 30, 2012 | 2:09 PM EDT

Elizabeth Warren's credibility took another hit today with stories in both major Boston daily newspapers stating that Warren was listed as a minority in a professional directory for nine years before she was hired by Harvard Law School in 1995.

The Boston Herald broke the story on Friday that Harvard Law School described Warren as its sole Native American professor during the mid-1990s when Harvard was under fire for lack of diversity among its faculty.

WaPo Court Reporter Hypes Former Reagan Solicitor General Who Thinks ObamaCare Mandate Is Constitutional
By Ken Shepherd | February 14, 2011 | 3:05 PM EST

ObamaCare's individual mandate is perfectly constitutional, arguments to the contrary are nonsensical "tea party stuff," and Chief Justice John Roberts shouldn't be counted as a solid vote against the health care purchase mandate when the case comes before the Supreme Court.

That's the perspective of former Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried.

In a February 14 story, Washington Post Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes cited Fried as a scholar with no dog in the ObamaCare fight:

WaPo Devotes 60-Paragraph Front Page Story to Workaholic Kagan, Pays Little Attention to Her Philosophy
By Ken Shepherd | June 10, 2010 | 4:37 PM EDT

Borrowing a line from one of her Harvard colleagues, the Washington Post entitled its June 10 front-page profile of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, "Her work is her life is her work."*

But the 60-paragraph story by staff writers Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker shed barely any light on the judicial philosophy that Kagan's life work demonstrates. Instead, Gerhart and Rucker presented a gauzy profile that rehashed the usual trivia -- Kagan loves poker and the opera -- while painting Kagan as a workaholic who still has time to lend an ear or a shoulder to cry on to friends in distress:

She has arrived at the age of 50 in a blaze of accomplishment. But her achievements can obscure how relatively narrow her world has been.