The Washington Post published a story on Tuesday by Ann Marimow about Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s return to coaching youth basketball. Apparently it is a wonder that a Supreme Court justice is resuming activities he did before he joined the high court.
Interestingly, the story was originally filed under the tag “public safety” and later changed to “local.”
A fellow reporter at the Washington Post offered one explanation.
more often than not, those section tags are a reflection of what team or editor handled a story (and who gets credit for corresponding traffic) as opposed to a subjective sorting decision. In this case, for example, nearly every story under that byline is tagged “public safety”
— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) November 27, 2018
It’s true, the tag seems to mark pieces with some inconsistencies. The author, a reporter who covers legal affairs, published a piece Nov. 19 about special counsel Robert Mueller. That, too, strangely fell under the “public safety” tag, and another she wrote about gerrymandering also landed in that category. There are a couple other misfits in that tag, such as a story about adoption and another about Maria Butina. But the majority of stories under the tag itself are local crime stories like murders, shoplifting, and vehicular homicides.
While the tag could have been a glitch or much ado about nothing, it seems a bit heavy-handed to be a mere tagging mistake for the Washington Post, which ran stories during the hearings with headlines such as “We were Brett Kavanaugh’s drinking buddies. We don’t think he should be confirmed” and “Brett Kavanaugh’s anger may be backfiring,” to name a few.
Even without the “public safety” nonsense, the story is an obvious, partisan dig at Kavanaugh’s credentials and image several weeks following his contentious hearings and ultimate confirmation. Marimow wrote:
The tone of the piece is one of scorn: How dare a man who coached basketball and volunteered at a homeless shelter fail to show up at public events in Washington, D.C., (where he might be vilified or worse) resume his normal activities after he was accused sexual assault in the public sphere? What did the public, nay, the omniscient, omnipresent media expect him to do?
Don’t see the bias there? Just look at the disdain for Kavanaugh in this viral Twitter thread from Marimow’s colleague Beth Reinhard.
Media bias is so common it’s almost a non-story. But the Washington Post is a publication of great repute. To continually harp on Kavanaugh seems even beyond their capability for media bias.
The publication’s editors or reporters may not believe him to be qualified. They may look at his life with disbelief that he “moved on.” But to call him a criminal, even in an obscure tag online, is an offense to the Supreme Court and the process which he and Christine Blasey Ford endured for him to get there.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
