 |
         
|
Most newsworthy, again, was that single sentence from Sonia Sotomayor's 2001 speech. CBS' Wyatt Andrews quoted the judge's own comment on it: "No words I have even spoken or written have received so much attention." It is a pet peeve at Tyndall Report that the reporting on this sentence has been cavalier to the point of sloppiness. So, one more time, this is what Sotomayor actually said: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who has not lived that life."
And this is how the three Supreme Court correspondents misleadingly paraphrased her:
"A wise Latina woman would reach a better conclusion than a white male"--CBS' Andrews.
"A wise Latina would reach a better conclusion than a white male"--ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg.
"A wise Latina woman would more often than not reach a better conclusion as a judge than a white male"--NBC's Pete Williams.
Williams was less egregious since he at least stated that Sotomayor was proposing a tendency--"…more often than not…"--rather than making a sweeping statement. Yet all three failed to note that this was an aspiration--"I would hope that…"--not a prediction. Furthermore, her comparison was not between any wise Latina and any white man but between a particular woman, whose life experiences happened to be rich, and a particular man, whose experiences were straitened. As mitigation, both CBS' Andrews and NBC's Williams did quote Sotomayor's clarification that she was referring to individuals in her comparison not categories: "I do not believe that any ethnic, gender or race group has an advantage in sound judging." Whatever the precise parsing, CBS' Jeff Greenfield (at the tail of the Andrews videostream) concluded that Sotomayor's critics had driven their point home: "The conservatives on the panel have made the case to their base and their supporters that this is someone who brings identity politics into the law."
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
