This was the rather quaint and outdated approach the Times took over the weekend, looking at the new Supreme Court vacancy and the politics in play.
The headline:
G.O.P. Weighs Political Price of Court Fight
And lede:
The retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens presents a test for Republicans as much as it does for President Obama as they weigh how much they want to wage a high-profile battle over ideological issues in the months before crucial midterm elections.
The premise made perfect sense. What was so naive though, were the people the Times interviewed to take the temperature of how the opposition might react when the White House announces its SCOTUS nominee: the Times quoted a GOP Congressman, a GOP senator, a GOP governor, a conservative activist, as well as a constitutional scholar.
To be fair, for decades those were the type of major players that journalists would turn to for perspective. But we're living in different time and the press needs face the fact that those once-relevant sources are currently outdated, and that a supposed 'news' outlet, Fox News, now serves as the de facto Opposition Party to the Obama White House. And it will be Fox News that largely decides what the conservative response to Obama's Supreme Court pick nominee will be. And if GOP senators and Congressmen want to follow along that's fine, but Fox News doesn't really care what they do any more.
My prediction? Fox News and the right-wing Noise Machine are going to hate the nominee and lead a scurrilous charge to smear and defame whoever the nominee is, just like Fox News and friends did last summer with Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Did it matter that she was a widely respected jurist and a legal star of her generation who garnered nearly universal acclaim among legal elites? Or that she was, in the end, easily confirmed?
It did not. Instead, she was tagged a “racist” who was "not so bright."
And that's why it won't matter this time, either. In terms of its business model, Fox News has to wage a ceaseless war against Democrats. Period. It won't matter how widely praised Obama's SCOTUS nominee is, or how subdued the official GOP response from Capitol Hill is, Fox News will find no shortage of right-wing talkers to trash the nominee. It will manufacture a loud, fact-free fight no matter of what the RNC says, because Fox News is in the business of stoking Obama hated.
More importantly, Fox News today is the Opposition Party, and news outlets, such as the Times, that refuse to acknowledge that fact look increasingly out of date.