news is a serious business and with so many important events out there to cover it is easy to be distracted by other, more intriguing stories that arise. Apparently ABC News employees were focused so intently on one particular human interest story, that when it came time for them to frame a headline for a comparatively dry article reporting poll results on the public’s perceptions of the Supreme Court, they mistakenly concluded that thirty percent was a more significant number than seventy percent. What was the cause of the distraction?When news spread through ABC News offices that a summer intern had posted nude pictures of herself on the Internet and may have even posed in college for Playboy, ABC News employees threw themselves into a feverish online search for the highly sought-after intern images. ABC News information management officials noticed a spike in employee visits to adult Internet sites and were forced to send an email to all employees reminding them that surfing adult sites during work time was discouraged. According to the New York Daily News which broke the story reported that ABC News had approximately seventy summer interns and ABC News employees were not sure which intern was the alleged Internet vixen. Thus, employees were captured in the web (no pun intended) of adult Internet sites and the natural human desire to solve a mystery.
So what resulted at ABC News from this nearly institution-wide loss of concentration? ABC headline writers apparently pulled themselves away from their surfing long enough to skim the results of an ABC-Washington Post poll that asked Americans whether they thought the Supreme Court was too liberal, too conservative, or balanced. In their clearly hasty review of the poll statistics, they crafted this misleading headline: “Three in 10 call SCOTUS ‘Too Conservative.’” The statistic itself was not misleading, but the choice to emphasize the thirty-one percent of Americans who felt the court was too conservative over the sixty-nine percent who did not, certainly was calculated to create the impression among readers that the court is too conservative. The ABC report also implied that the court had become too conservative since the additions of justices Roberts and Alito.
What the poll results actually revealed was that forty-seven percent believed the Supreme Court was balanced in its political ideology, with eighteen percent stating the court was still too liberal despite Roberts’ and Alito’s influence. When sixty-nine percent of Americans in a poll jointly constructed and conducted by two left-leaning news organizations state that the court is not too conservative, liberals should give close attention to what that statistic portends for their political futures, as it strongly implies that a significant majority of Americans would approve of the selection of additional conservative justices when further openings occur. If ABC News employees had given as much attention to selecting a headline that emphasized what the poll results actually indicated rather than how they wanted those statistics to be interpreted by readers, the headline would have been quite different.
Senator Chuck Schumer (NY-D) was so convinced of the court’s alleged conservative imbalance
that he referred to the court as “dangerously imbalanced,” and called on fellow Democrats to block all future court nominees from President Bush because the current court is “ultraconservative.” Schumer’s inflammatory exaggeration of the court’s ideological makeup was based on his objection to the court’s reversals of decisions made by previously liberal-dominated courts. Schumer’s math is shoddy at best and disingenuous at worst. Conservatives on the Supreme Court hold a 5-4 majority, but even conservatives complain that the court did not move far enough to the right or center even with the additions of Alito and Roberts. When conservatives hold only a one vote majority on the court, use of the term “ultraconservative” is blatantly inaccurate. Apparently when a court votes to reverse unconstitutional decisions of prior courts, such as affirmative action programs that differentiate between races, colors, or other factors prohibited by the constitution, that is “ultraconservative” to Schumer. Perhaps that explains why sixty-nine percent of Americans still feel the court is not too conservative, leaving room for it to move even further to the right in restoring constitutionality to the court’s decisions.If the adage is true that if you tell people something often enough it becomes truth, then ABC News and Senator Schumer are working diligently to create a fictional truth about the court. Both are attempting to convince Americans of an ideological imbalance on the Supreme Court when in fact no such imbalance actually exists. Then again, ABC News employees were also desperately searching for Internet intern photos that may or may not exist. Chasing desirable mirages, whether they be summer interns or poll statistics that don’t quite fit the liberal argument, appears to be the currently preferred activity for ABC News staffers. Along with emails warning employees about surfing adult Internet sites, ABC News should advise staff to match headlines with the actual content of their news stories.
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ABC News, Supreme Court, Summer Interns, Chuck Schumer, Conservative Court, Poll Results, Misleading Headlines
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