Elena Kagan

MRC Study: Media Blackout of Supreme Court 'Battle'
By Rich Noyes | June 24, 2010 | 10:32 AM EDT
When President Obama picked Elena Kagan to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the broadcast networks referred to the upcoming Senate confirmation process as “contentious” a “meat grinder” and a “battle,” warning Kagan was “in for a fight.”

But a Media Research Center analysis of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts in the six weeks since Kagan was nominated shows the broadcast networks have failed to cover the “fight,” and have ignored most of the controversies that could lead to suspenseful hearings next week.

MRC analysts found that the broadcast network evening newscasts aired just eleven stories about Kagan since her May 10 nomination (six on CBS, three on ABC and two on NBC), plus another three brief items read by the anchor. All but one of those stories appeared during the first week after Kagan’s selection; only the CBS Evening News, in a June 3 report, has bothered to cover any of the thousands of pages of Kagan documents released in recent weeks.
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. 

CBS Reporter: Thin-Skinned White House Won't Tolerate Reports Elena Kagan Is Liberal
By Rich Noyes | June 8, 2010 | 11:07 AM EDT
On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford revealed how the Obama White House is “strongly” pushing back against her unsurprising report last week that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan “stood shoulder to shoulder with the liberal left” when she clerked for liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Crawford says the White House reaction to her report “has been astonishing....Their reaction has been to push back so strongly on allegations, as they would put it, that she’s a liberal. Like there’s something wrong with that, like it’s a smear to say their nominee is a liberal.”

To Crawford, Team Obama’s strategy reeks of phoniness: “They’re putting enormous pressure on Elena Kagan who, as you said, is qualified. She’s an intellectual superstar. They’re putting pressure on her to portray herself in these hearings as something other than what she is. They’re thinking short-term politically and not long-term for the Court and the law and liberal judicial philosophy.”
CBS Chief Legal Correspondent Annoyed White House Trying to Conceal Kagan’s Liberalism; Calls it an 'Insult'
By Jeff Poor | June 6, 2010 | 2:00 PM EDT

This is probably what a lot of people suspected, but couldn't tie it all of it together until documents and memos from President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan were made available to the public - that she is beyond a shadow of a doubt liberal.

Still, the White House has insisted Kagan's judicial philosophy doesn't line up ideologically - that she is neither liberal nor conservative. But according to documents unearthed by CBS Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford, Kagan holds some very liberal views.

"These documents have her squarely within mainstream liberal thought," Crawford said on the June 6 broadcast of CBS's "Face the Nation." "She's worried about the conservative Supreme Court undoing rulings that would give a woman a right to an abortion. She's worried about gun rights saying she's not sympathetic to an individual's right to own a handgun. She's concerned about conservative rulings scaling back rights of criminals. That's basic mainstream liberal thought."

AP Changes Clinton-Era History To Call Elena Kagan Pragmatic
By Candance Moore | June 6, 2010 | 12:20 PM EDT
The Associated Press apparently thinks its readers are either too young or too stupid to remember something that happened thirteen years ago.

On Friday, the Clinton Presidential Library released formerly private documents from the '90s that revolved around Elena Kagan's stint as an advisor to President Clinton. Of particular interest was her encouraging Clinton to veto a ban on partial birth abortions for late-term babies.

When Clinton used his veto pen to stop the ban in 1997, it was intensely controversial. Media archives from that year show it was described as a "bitter battle" over something full of "public revulsion." 

How things change in thirteen years. Now with a pro-choice Supreme Court nominee to get through confirmation hearings, the AP blatantly ignored history to portray Kagan's advice as common sense pragmatism.

Writer Julie Hirschfeld Davis penned a dispatch obviously designed to be as friendly as possible, even if that left a few facts out of the story (h/t LiveAction):

CBS: Memos Show Kagan ‘Stood Shoulder to Shoulder with the Liberal Left’
By Brad Wilmouth | June 3, 2010 | 11:43 PM EDT

On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, correspondent Jan Crawford filed a report recounting revelations that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has a history of taking solidly liberal positions on issues like abortion, gay rights, and gun control – with evidence in the form of memos, some going back to her days working for liberal Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Crawford: "Documents buried in Thurgood Marshall's papers in the Library of Congress show that, as a young lawyer, Kagan stood shoulder to shoulder with the liberal left, including on the most controversial issue Supreme Court nominees ever confront: abortion."

The CBS correspondent informed viewers that Kagan had fretted about conservatives restricting abortion rights: "In a case involving a prisoner who wanted the state to pay for her to have the procedure, Kagan writes to Marshall that the conservative-leaning court could use the case to rule against the woman and ‘create some very bad law on abortion.’"

Notably, on Monday, May 10, as the broadcast network evening newscasts introduced Kagan to their viewers, only CBS referred to her liberal ideology, as Crawford asserted: "Her career has put her solidly on the left."

To Media and Left, Wartime Service Unimportant for Supreme Court
By Sarah Knoploh | May 27, 2010 | 1:25 PM EDT

The United States is fighting two wars - in Iraq and Afghanistan - so it's natural that the nation's leaders have a solid understanding of what war is about. But President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court has no wartime experience and if she is confirmed, that would mean no member of the highest court would have served in the military in or near combat.

This is a major shift for a nation with a proud military tradition. In the past 100 years, the United States has fought two World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the Gulf War. American servicemen and women fought in the Philippines, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Bosnia and many more. Given the nature of the terror threat America faces, more countries probably will likely join that list.

The three major broadcast networks have ignored this issue since Obama's May 10 nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. Kagan does not have any military experience and is considered by some as anti-military. Yet, out of 17 stories on ABC, CBS and NBC since Kagan was named, not one has even mentioned the issue of wartime experience.

This, despite liberal arguments that a judge's experience is key to his or her decisions, and that the most lionized of progressive Supreme Court justices was an emphatically proud veteran of the Civil War, whose tombstone lists his war service before his court tenure.  

George Stephanopoulos Spins Supreme Court Collegiality as Another Reason to Confirm Kagan
By Scott Whitlock | May 27, 2010 | 12:40 PM EDT

Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Thursday touted Supreme Court collegiality from Justice Antonin Scalia as a real victory in the battle over Elena Kagan's nomination. Stephanopoulos enthused, "Justice Scalia, who is likely to be a conservative adversary if Kagan gets confirmed, pointed out that everybody on the bench now is a judge."

(Kagan is likely to be a conservative adversary? The ABC host appeared to be continuing the liberal talking point that the mind of Obama's nominee is somehow unknowable.)

Stephanopoulos eagerly quoted, "So, he went on to say, 'I'm happy to see that the latest nominee is not a federal judge and not a judge at all.' Of course, Kagan has gotten some criticism from some senators because she's not a judge."

Newsweek's Adler Furthers Meme That Conservatives Are Obsessed with Kagan's Sexuality
By Ken Shepherd | May 21, 2010 | 12:20 PM EDT

Another day, another liberal meme.

Yesterday I tackled how Newsweek's Howard Fineman was attacking Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul for picking a fight that the liberal media, in fact, was whipping up.

Today, it's Fineman colleague Ben Adler and his insistence that conservatives are fixated on smearing both Elena Kagan and softball players everywhere as gay.

Adler made his argument in his May 20 The Gaggle blog post, "What Is With Conservatives, Gays, and Softball" by picking apart a comment Fox Business Network's John Stossel made on Fox News Channel in which he defended Paul's comments regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964.What annoyed Adler most was Stossel's quip that gay softball leagues, for example, should not be forced to admit straight players:

The gay softball team? The proverbial black student association has long been every anti-civil-rights pundit's favorite shibboleth, but why suddenly gay softball team? Do gay people have separate softball teams that don't allow straight people to play for them? If so, it's still an awfully random example. Oh wait, no it isn't, it's a dog whistle to everyone who thinks that women who play softball are gay, and that therefore Solicitor General Elena Kagan is gay. Stay classy, John. 

There are two problems with this. First and foremost, it was gay groups that first made a stink about an innocuous photo by the Wall Street Journal that was clearly selected as a clever tease for a story in the May 11 edition. The headline and caption for the Kagan-playing-softball photo were as follows:

MRC-TV: Bozell Discusses Kagan/Miers Double Standard on 'Fox & Friends'
By NB Staff | May 17, 2010 | 11:25 AM EDT
In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama cast doubt on President Bush's pick of Harriet Miers in part because "her [legal] experience does not include serving as a judge" and as such "we have yet to know her views on many of the critical constitutional issues facing our country today."

Yet five years later, after President Obama named his solicitor general -- who has also never served as a judge -- to the Supreme Court, the media are not picking up on the parallels between the Miers pick and Obama's choice of Elena Kagan.

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell discussed this on today's "Fox & Friends" program in an interview via satellite shortly before 8:30 a.m. EDT [MP3 audio available here].:

Sneak Peek: MRC's Notable Quotables Newsletter
By NB Staff | May 16, 2010 | 5:11 PM EDT

As a Sunday afternoon treat, here’s a sneak peek at the May 17 edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter, our bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media. The entire edition will be posted, with five video clips, at www.MRC.org on Monday morning.


Shortsighted Voters Fail to Grasp Obama’s Historic Greatness

“Big problems. Big achievements. Big costs. Historians say President Obama’s legislative record during a crisis-ridden presidency already puts him in a league with such consequential presidents as Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. But polls show voters aren’t totally on board with his achievements, at least not yet, and the White House acknowledges that his victories have carried huge financial and political costs. ‘There are always costs in doing big things,’ Obama told USA Today.”
— Opening of May 12 USA Today cover story by Susan Page and Mimi Hall, “Will doing ‘big things’ wind up costing Obama?” The accompanying picture showed a portrait of Abraham Lincoln peering down at President Obama.

Elena Kagan, Arizona Law Coverage Discussed on Hannity's 'Media Mash' Segment with MRC's Bozell
By NB Staff | May 14, 2010 | 11:17 AM EDT
Appearing on the May 13 "Hannity" program for a "Media Mash" segment,  NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell tackled the media coverage of the Elena Kagan nomination. After the Fox News host played some clips of network anchors focusing on how the Obama Court nominee loves opera, softball, and poker, Bozell noted it was par for the course.

While "from the moment he was nominated, [Clarence Thomas] was savaged," whenever a liberal is nominated by a Democratic president, the media label him or her a moderate and focus on humanizing them, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell noted.

[MP3 audio available here]

Also of note, Bozell argued, was how the media have been largely quiet about a promotional video the White House produced to gin up positive PR for Kagan: