FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2592MEDIA ADVISORY:
"Borking" History:
1987 Supreme Court fight often misremembered
July 21, 2005
The media have settled on a conventional wisdom about the failed 1987
Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. As the oft-repeated story
goes, Bork's supporters were somehow unable to mount any kind of pro-Bork
campaign as a well-organized liberal opposition outmaneuvered them and
doomed Bork's chances to be a Supreme Court justice. This conventional
wisdom bears little resemblance to what actually occurred--but it's a
very useful myth for conservative activists preparing for a possible
confirmation battle over Bush nominee John G. Roberts.
The Washington Post (7/11/05) reported the Bork history this way: "When
President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork, liberals mounted a
well-organized, well-financed campaign against him, and conservatives were slow and
ineffective in responding." The Post article attributed the creation
of the Committee for Justice, a group formed to lobby for George W.
Bush's Supreme Court nominees, to "the lasting influence of the Bork fight
in 1987."
Much of the current media discussion is a chance for right-wing
activists to claim they were victimized--a tale that has found a sympathetic
media ear. As Time magazine put it (7/11/05), conservatives "were
caught off guard by Sen. Edward Kennedy's lightning-fast characterization of
Bork--within an hour of Bork's nomination--as a man who would create an
America where 'women would be forced into back-alley abortions
blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.' The label stuck and
helped ensure Bork's defeat."
According to the Los Angeles Times (6/20/05), "Civil rights groups
followed up with million-dollar lobbying campaigns and a barrage of
criticism of Bork's views on civil rights laws." National Public Radio
(7/6/05) aired without rebuttal a soundbite from conservative legal activist
Jay Sekulow, who complained, "That was a time when the right was not
mobilized at all." And Bork himself told CNN (7/3/05) that "there were
no groups in my support."
The Washington Post reported that things have changed (7/3/05): "The
conservative movement has something it lacked during its losing battle
for the confirmation of Robert H. Bork to the court 18 years ago: a
highly coordinated movement that has fused the big dollars of economic
conservatives with the grass-roots clout of millions of religious
conservatives."
Down the Memory Hole?
But what were prominent media outlets reporting back in 1987 about
Bork's supporters?
"Arrayed on the pro-Bork side are the Knights of Columbus, the
Fraternal Order of Police, the National Federation of Republican Women and the
Southern Baptist Convention Public Affairs Committee, according to a
list released last week by the White House," the Washington Post reported
(9/25/87).
The Post went on to suggest that pro-Bork groups were less visible in
Washington--but that doesn't mean they weren't active:
"Instead, right-to-life, religious and conservative organizations have
concentrated on direct-mail and telephone campaigns, with some success.
At the office of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.)--a key vote on the Senate
Judiciary Committee--where staffers answer the phone, 'Sen. Specter's
office; are you calling about the Bork nomination?' letters from
constituents were running 25,373 for Bork and 10,414 against as of Tuesday."
A September 3, 1987 New York Times story (headlined "Bork Backers Flood
Senate With Mail") also indicated that a pro-Bork campaign was well
underway: "The Senate Judiciary Committee is receiving thousands of
letters from Bork supporters who say his ascension to the Court from the
Federal appeals court here would mean the reversal of dozens of decisions,
including those on abortion, school prayer and pornography." Moral
Majority leader Jerry Falwell was quoted by the Times as saying that the
campaign to support Bork's nomination "is the most important one in
which we have engaged in years.... The future of America may be at stake."
And some participants suggested that Bork's supporters were in fact
ready from the start. Patrick McGuigan of the Coalitions for America, a
pro-Bork lobbying group, told the Washington Post (7/7/87): "It began
immediately. The first meetings of conservative leaders to brainstorm and
begin to start action were the very next morning."
Concerned Women for America activated phone banks to generate messages
of support to Congress, and reportedly collected 72,000 signatures on a
pro-Bork petition (L.A. Times, 9/25/87). Direct mail pitches were
common among conservative groups, as was outreach to the media. One New
York Times report (9/11/87) suggested that conservative groups "could
ultimately amass $10 million" in support of Bork. Conservative direct
mail guru Richard Viguerie told the Times, ''This is probably the
strongest mailing conservatives have had in many years.'' ABC's Barry Serafin
reported (9/3/87) that "Two and a half million dollars for newspaper
ads supporting Bork and blasting his opponents is being raised by a
California group."
Some of Bork's supporters were explicit about their reasons for pushing
the nomination. A letter from a prominent evangelical group advised,
"Robert Bork does not support the idea of a constitutional right to
engage in sodomy.... He may help us stop the gay rights issue and thus help
stem the spread of AIDS." Prominent conservative Jack Kemp sent a
similar letter to his supporters (New York Times, 9/3/87): "Will the right
of communities to take positive steps to prevent the spread of AIDS be
upheld?"
After the dust had settled, opinions varied about why Bork was
defeated. One Washington Post report (10/24/87) claimed that "Bork's critics
made some wild and distorted charges against him, but there is no
evidence that they made an important difference in the outcome.... But by the
end of the long and painful struggle, there was a consensus in the
Senate that it was Bork -- and his lifetime of iconoclastic resistance to
the main tides of American politics and jurisprudence-- that lay at the
heart of his downfall."
Bork did have extreme and unusual views about the Constitution, such as
his severely restrictive view of the First Amendment: "Constitutional
protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly
political," he wrote in the Indiana Law Journal (Fall/71). "There is no basis
for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be
it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or
pornographic."
Fifty-eight senators--the most that ever voted against a Supreme Court
nominee--decided that these and other controversial beliefs made Bork
an unsuitable candidate for the Supreme Court. Washington Post
columnist Colman McCarthy perhaps summed it up best (10/18/87), writing that
right-wing complaints about the unfair process were "the sound of a sore
loser. Losing, apparently, is a sensation from which Bork's supporters
thought, by divine right or Reagan's winning 49 of 50 states in 1984,
they were exempt."
Unfortunately, reporters are now allowing these conservative complaints
to frame much of their reporting. Rather than accepting this as the
natural working of a system that is designed to check the president's
power to select justices, the media has decided to present this as an
injustice--using "bork" as a verb meaning "to attack a person's reputation
and views unfairly" (CNN, 7/1/05; see Media Matters, 7/3/05).
This story has relevance for today's battle for the Supreme Court.
Conservative activists have been making the same complaint over and over
again to reporters: Our side didn't get a fair shake in 1987. Are
conservatives pressing these bogus grievances in the hopes of generating
more friendly media coverage in 2005? The answer would seem to be yes.
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