Josh Blackman is a conservative lawyer who teaches at South Texas College of Law Houston. He has an expertise in constitutional law and recently the New York Times quoted him twice in 24 hours. Both times it labeled him "conservative."
Blackman contacted the Times to point out that while their description of him is accurate, the paper rarely refers to left-leaning figures it quotes in news stories as liberal or progressive. Blackman wrote a letter to the editor which included his own research on the topic backing up his claim. The Times didn't publish his letter but last week the paper's "managing editor for Standards and Trust," Patrick Healy, invited Blackman to do an interview to talk about it.
JOSH: Sure. This has been a longstanding grievance of mine, and not just against The Times, against all the major media outlets. I’ll frequently talk to a reporter and they’ll say something like, “How would you identify yourself?” And they’re not asking for my pronouns. They’re trying to get at my politics. And sometimes I’m of course like, you know, “I’m a law professor.” And they say, “Well, how do you characterize yourself?” It’s like, “Well, I’m a constitutional law professor,” and I know what they’re getting at. Eventually I just say, fine, if you want to call me conservative, you can...
Back in February of this year, I was quoted twice in The New York Times back to back in the span of 24 hours, which is, you know, pretty cool. But I sort of noticed that both of the references were to Josh Blackman as a “conservative” law professor. And I just thought that was strange. So I went through the Westlaw archives and just sort of searched for “liberal” law professors and “conservative" law professors in the New York Times database, and it was far more likely that you’re identifying a conservative than a liberal. And those numbers are stacked because liberals are quoted even more often. So the numbers even have a greater disparity.
And this sort of reinforces, I think, a perception that both the academy and frankly the media views a liberal position as a neutral position. And the conservative position is the other, the outlier.
He's exactly right, of course. The Times and other mainstream papers routinely treat the Left as the "normal" view and the Right as something that needs to be identified and cordoned off for everyone's safety. That's what they do when they bother to speak to someone on the right at all. Sometimes they don't bother.
Most surprising, Patrick Healy admitted Blackman was right and that it does make it seem as if the Times is taking sides.
Yeah. Josh, I think there’s real truth to your critique and it’s something we need to do a better job on. It’s kind of exactly what you said in terms of why we do it. We’re trying to give readers more factual context about who’s speaking or why their views rise to the level of a story. Sometimes it’s notable that it’s a conservative legal scholar criticizing President Trump’s politics more than it might be surprising that a liberal is doing that.
But I do really think you’re right. It can come off like The Times treats liberals as normal and conservatives as unique and worthy of labeling. In the legal academy, there are a lot of liberals, but that doesn’t justify it. I think we need to be more discerning about it. I’m curious, though, if there are moments where and when you think such labels are necessary.
Blackman was very cordial but went on to make the case that failing to treat both sides equally was slanting stories at the Times.
...there have been articles where it says, “Conservative Prof. Josh Blackman and Professor So-and-So.” The other one doesn’t get any label. And then so the reader says, well, the other person is just neutral, you know, just straight arrow. And this guy Blackman is coming here with an agenda and that’s sort of just — it doesn’t convey the right framing for your readers. And I think — shorthand or whatever it is — whatever one gets the other should get.
And he mentions that sometimes the stories just leave conservatives out entirely.
And there’s some of your reporters who know me and they talk to me from time to time, and others don’t. I mean, I could give you another list of stories where they only give one side of the story. And those are the ones where they call the professor at Harvard or Yale, and just by virtue of doing that, you’re calling only liberals, because Harvard has like two conservatives in the faculty. It’s just not going to happen. I think Yale has maybe half a conservative in the facility, depending how you count. So they have to sort of branch out and, you know, there are podcasts, there’s social media, they have to sort of track and follow the arguments being put forward in this arena.
Will this help in the long run? I'm not willing to hold my breath, but I do give the Times some credit for at least acknowledging that there is a problem and that they do need to do better with how they label people. There are still too many stories that pop up in the Times that seem more interested in pointing to heroes and villains than in investigating an issue.
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