Neil Lewis's Reporting on Court Packed With Bias

Neil Lewis's latest slanted story on "conservative" judges vs. Obama's non-ideological ones: Conservatives want to "roll back affirmative action" and are "restrictive of abortion rights" and "less accommodating to criminal defendants."

Supreme Court reporter Neil Lewis again displayed a stark double standard while speculating about what kind of judges President Obama would appoint to federal appeals courts, in Wednesday's "Obama's CourtNominees Are Focus of Speculation." The text box read: "A watch has begun for signs of an ideological shift on the bench."

Lewis avoided using the word "liberal," although that's clearly what is implied by "an ideological shift" from the Bush administration. Apparently the original online headline (the one at the very top of the screen, which differs from the current text in the story itself) was more explicit: "Experts Watch for Signs Obama Will Move Appeals Court to the Left."

In contrast, the Times has never hesitated to talk about potential shifts to the right on the bench, as Lewis himself did in an amazingly slanted May 2008 story hypothesizing about the potential Supreme Court nominees of a future President Obama or President McCain. Lewis used the "conservative" label 18 times in unflattering fashion (Lewis argued that John McCain would be forced to pay "fealty" to the "conservative faithful" by appointing staunch conservative justices), but didn't once say Obama's nominees might be liberal, only that they would promote an "expansive, progressive view of the Constitution."

In his latest story, Lewis again portrayed conservatives in negative fashion: They want to "roll back affirmative action" and are "restrictive of abortion rights" and "less accommodating to criminal defendants." A conservative would turn around those same points and say that they favor a color-blind society, want to protect the rights of the unborn, and favor tough anti-crime measures.









Arthur Hellman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh law school who is an authority on the circuit courts, said reliable studies regularly demonstrated that the Republican-appointed judges had moved the nation's courts in a more conservative direction in several areas.
