To the ever-growing list of media critics in our country, add one more name: United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Justice Scalia issued a memorandum today, refusing to recuse himself from a case regarding the confidentiality of the identities of advisors to Vice President Cheney’s energy policy task force. In that memorandum, Justice Scalia has some harsh criticism for numerous false assertions made by newspapers across the country — including the L.A. Times, which filed a “false report” about his speech to an advocacy group, and misrepresented several crucial details of his hunting trip with Cheney.

I doubt that this portion of Scalia’s defense is going to get much press. The L.A. Times’s snarky coverage of Scalia’s memorandum tonight certainly doesn’t acknowledge the numerous mistakes made by the Times. I’ll leave it to others to debate the merits of Scalia’s position on the recusal issue. I am more interested in Scalia’s detailed accusations of inaccuracy by the media. Because, without accurate facts, how can we have a useful debate on the underlying merits?

The most stunning example is the fact that the Times, in its March 8 Scalia story, falsely reported that Scalia had spoken to “an advocacy group waging a legal battle against gay rights” — specifically the right to civil unions. According to Justice Scalia, the reporter knew otherwise when he wrote the story. Scalia says:

The Times’s reporter had interviewed the former President of the Urban Family Council, who told him categorically that the Council was neither a party to, nor had provided financial support for, the civil-union litigation. The filed papers in the case, publicly available, showed that the Council was not a party. The Los Angeles Times nonetheless devoted a lengthy front page article to the point that (in the words of the lead sentence) “Justice Antonin Scalia gave a keynote dinner speech in Philadelphia for an advocacy group waging a legal battle against gay rights.”

Scalia then notes that the paper later ran a correction tepidly retracting this false claim:

Five days later, in a weekend edition, the paper printed (at the insistence of the Council) a few-line retraction acknowledging that this asserted fact was wrong — as though it was merely one incidental fact in a long piece, rather than the central fact upon which the long piece was based, and without which there was no story.

I agree with Scalia that, with the corrected facts, there really wasn’t much of a story there (though I think the editors would have run the story anyway). And he makes a great point — about which I will have much more to say in the future — concerning the prominence given to corrections retracting central items in front-page stories. As a matter of fairness, such corrections should be given the same prominence as the front-page story, but virtually never are.

But at least they corrected the story, right?

Well, sort of:

Other inaccurate facts and insinuations in the article, brought to the paper’s attention by the Council, were not corrected.

Scalia lists numerous other factual misstatements and misleading descriptions by a litany of newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the San Antonio Express-News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Buffalo News, the Palm Beach Post, Newsday, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Contra Costa Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Washington Post.

However, I am not yet done with the L.A. Times. Many of the facts that were mangled by these other publications were trumpeted in a Los Angeles Times editorial denouncing Scalia — and have yet to be corrected. That editorial began:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t just casually meet up with Vice President Dick Cheney for a few days of male bonding and duck shooting in Louisiana last month on a hunting trip. The judge was the vice president’s official guest.

Scalia explains in the memorandum that he was not the guest of the Vice President, but of Wallace Carline. (Carline, by the way, has been described misleadingly by the Times as an “oil industry businessman,” a term that connotes Big Oil, whereas Carline actually runs a company that provides services and equipment rental to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.) The trip wasn’t “a few days,” it was about 48 hours total.

But that’s nothing. It gets much worse. The editorial continues:

It’s bad enough that Scalia went hunting with the vice president, who has a case before him. It’s worse, as several legal experts have noted, that the trip was at the expense, in effect, of the vice president.

Uh, no. Scalia says that he traveled to Louisiana on Air Force Two and traveled back on a commercial airliner on which he had purchased a round-trip ticket (a fact not mentioned in tonight’s Times article covering the memorandum). Scalia explains: “In other words, none of us saved a cent by flying on the Vice President’s plane.”

The Times article on Scalia’s riding on Air Force Two also made much of the supposed “fact” that the trip was at Cheney’s expense. That “fact” is now known to be false. Will the Times issue a prominent, front-page correction? I rather doubt it.

The editorial continues:

In mid-December, the high court voted to hear arguments in the appeal, now scheduled for April. Three weeks after that vote, Scalia and Cheney spent two days huddled together in a Louisiana marsh. Because the duck hunting was lousy, they had plenty of time to kill — and to talk privately.

Scalia says that he and Cheney were never in the same duck blind, and in fact Scalia does not recall their ever being alone together on the entire trip. Most assuredly, he says, they did not speak privately, especially about the case. The Times has never printed any evidence to the contrary — yet the editorial makes baseless insinuations and assertions to the contrary.

The editorial further says:

Scalia has bristled at suggestions that he recuse himself or that his longtime friendship with Cheney — and their many past hunting trips — could bias his judgment.

I am open to correction, but I am unaware that Cheney and Scalia have gone on “many past hunting trips” together. Where is the evidence for that in the Times? The original Times article says nothing to back up that assertion, nor does the follow-up article. This appears to be more uninformed glibness on the part of the Times editorial writers.

The editorial says that “the more that is known about the January trip, the worse it looks.” Actually, the more that is known about it, the less bad it looks. But that’s because all we knew about it before is what the Times had told us — and I hate to say it, but based on what Scalia is saying, it looks like the Times botched the facts.

All these confident assertions — all wrong. Scalia’s claims regarding the trip in his memorandum on these points are not contradicted by any evidence of which I am aware. The stories printed by the Times contained not one shred of proof of any of the above false assertions.

There can be no defense that this is merely an editorial. Editorials still have to get the facts right. And this is not the first editorial in which the Times has gravely botched the facts — not by a longshot.

The Times may argue that it has “corrected” these facts by reporting about Scalia’s memorandum, which sets forth the true facts. But a true correction must acknowledge that the facts previously reported were incorrect. I haven’t seen that with respect to the litany of false “facts” reported above. And many of the facts discussed in Scalia’s memorandum — like the fact that he bought a round-trip ticket and therefore was not flown at Cheney’s expense — are still unreported by the Times. [UPDATE: A second version of the Times story does report this.]

The Times editorial staff is big on sitting people down for a little “chat.” The editorial on Scalia discussed above concludes: “It’s time Scalia’s colleagues took him aside for a little chat.” A subsequent editorial regarding Justice Ginsburg and Justice Scalia says that, if they won’t recuse themselves when the Times editors think they should, “the chief justice needs to sit down with them for a chat.”

Given the apparent reluctance of the Times editors to admit when they are wrong, I think they should take a look at the mote in their own eye. And then someone should sit down with them for a little chat.