When Donald Trump lies, he does not get help from the establishment. Likewise, I’m pretty sure journalists, though they might regret a particular Supreme Court decision, once understood and properly reported the court’s role in American life. It’s not a policy-making body. Arbitrary decisions, the proper stuff of politicians and legislatures, are anathema to the court. A state legislature rightly is entitled and even obliged to decide, by a vote of 51% to 49%, that life begins at 15 weeks, 24 weeks, 27 weeks or even zero weeks—and try to make it the law of its jurisdiction. A court has no authority to do this. The same Supreme Court that foolishly embroiled itself in arbitrary “viability” debates for 50 years nevertheless was restrained enough not to invent a fetal right to life (also potentially implied in Roe v. Wade), though it’s easier to imagine such a right being found in the Constitution than a right to abortion.

But a lot more than objectivity has gone missing in our reporting; intelligence has gone missing. The people in charge of the nation’s newsrooms, I continue to believe, are not as deeply, profoundly stupid as so much of what they put on their homepages, increasingly in positions calculated to attract clicks. Then I realize: The internet waits for no man. Neither does happy hour. Thinking and writing carefully require time and effort. The press hasn’t so much abandoned standards of objectivity; it has abandoned standards of effort under a digital imperative that not only favors low-intelligence “hot takes,” but makes them the calling card of what used to be a “news” industry.