David Savage Gets It Wrong — Again
The L.A. Times yesterday (my emphasis):
[Supreme Court nominee John G.] Roberts is a popular figure in Republican legal circles in Washington and is a member of the conservative Federalist Society.
Everyone knows that, like all good Republican lawyers, John G. Roberts Jr. is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative law and public policy organization where right-of-center types meet to denounce liberalism and angle for jobs in the Bush administration.
And practically everyone — CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Legal Times and, just yesterday, The Washington Post — has reported Roberts’s membership as a fact. One liberal group opposed to Roberts’s nomination, the Alliance for Justice, has noted it on its Web site.
But they are wrong. John Roberts is not, in fact, a member of the Federalist Society, and he says he never has been.
(My emphasis throughout.)
And the author of the erroneous L.A. Times piece? It is co-written by our friend David Savage. (Henry Weinstein and Richard B. Schmitt also contributed to the piece. But Savage’s name comes first in the byline.)
It seems like yesterday that I was talking about how David Savage often seems to get things wrong on the law and the judiciary — to the detriment of conservatives, naturally — when the Washington Post gets them right. (To be fair, the WaPo got this one wrong initially as well.)
Of course, it wasn’t just yesterday that I made that complaint. It was three days ago.
P.S. Amusingly, as has happened before, the editorial page got snookered by Savage’s reporting and embroidered it a bit, turning Roberts into a “fixture” (you hear that? Not just a member — a fixture!) at the Federalist Society:
Roberts has long been a member of the Washington establishment, and a fixture in the Federalist Society.
P.P.S. Clearly, a note to the Readers’ Representative is in order. And, of course, one has been sent.
Naturally, I have asked where Savage got his information. One wonders whether it was from the web site of the liberal group Alliance for Justice . . .
UPDATE 8-5-05: I have a post about the New York Times‘s decision to seek the adoption records of John Roberts’s children, here.
Better watch that bad ole Judge Roberts, He’s a republican and he has contributed money to the republican party. Can’t have that or the boogy man on the left will get you. Can these people possibly get any more stupid? Every day I learn that they really can. They’re like a person falling into a bottomless pit, grasping for things that aren’t there.
scraprion (a071ac) — 7/21/2005 @ 8:29 pmHe had better join the Society. We don’t look kindly upon outsiders.
Angry Clam (f05866) — 7/21/2005 @ 8:48 pmFrom item #16 of Cheat-Seeking Missile’s list of MSM bias in the nomination:
Why the interest in his alleged membership in the Federalist Society? Oh, sure, it might be a legit quest for information to flesh out his thin record. But if that were all there is to this little mistake, ask yourself if the media made such a big deal of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s true ACLU affiliation? And would they have written it up like this:
“Ginsberg is also a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, a fraternity/sorority of liberals, mostly attorneys, whose members often espouse the view that the Constitution should not be interpreted literally and and support “activist” judicial decisions that find implicity but unwritten rights in the document including the unwritten right to privacy from which abortion rights are derived.”
Laer (a6a7a0) — 7/21/2005 @ 8:58 pmI can hear Teddy Kennedy’s sonorous voice now:
“Judge Roberts, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist Society.”
David (0ae6d2) — 7/21/2005 @ 10:02 pmWatch out for the Cons. They take their lead from
Harold Conway (1ab716) — 7/22/2005 @ 6:33 pmRove. A very DIRTY player. Ridicule a person or
attack his reputation these are the real values
of the sheep in wolves clothing. VALUES?????
You present yourselves as very decent loving
people when in fact you are all a disgrasce to your country.The result of your rule will one
day become obvious when it is too late. H
Mr. Conway has obviously been sniffing some of that MSM printer’s ink!!! This country is sinking under the ongoing financial disaster of the Great Society and he’s bashing us for our values??? Mr. Conway, get a life!!! Join MOVEON(OUT) and really do something useless.
Tom Proctor (ed4b23) — 7/23/2005 @ 3:52 amMr. Conway is absolutley correct. Rove is the archetype for the Peanuts character Pigpen. He’s been busy planting laughably implausable stories about Judge Roberts in the Post so that we won’t learn the real truth until it’s too late. What’s the real truth? Just ask Harold, he knows. Bush, Rove and Roberts are really brain eating mutants bent on world domination because dominated brains just taste so much better than free brains.
Global warming – Rove did it. Famine in Uganda – Rove. Penguin population explodes – Rove. Penguin suicide bombers – Rove. Why Rove? Becuase it’s so much easier to type than Haliburton.
Pat Rand (810775) — 7/25/2005 @ 7:10 am