The Media Research Center isn’t the only ConWeb outlet attacking ProPublica for factual reporting on ethical issues involving right-wing Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. A June 21 article by the apparently unironically named Charlie McCarthy touted how “Alito used an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal to respond to ProPublica, which lodged the allegations against the justice.”
Eric Mack parroted right-wing attacks on the Alito story in a June 22 article tagged as “news” but is clearly an opinion piece:
As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito rejects ProPublica’s latest conservative justice attack as it’s becoming increasing clear to many observers the attacks under the guise of “ethics concerns” are coordinated against the conservative majority, while ignoring the liberal minority.
ProPublica, as reviewed by AllSides, does not treat Democrat-appointed Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, or Ketanji Brown Jackson with the same discerned scrutiny. The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and now-retired Democrat-appointed Justice Stephen Breyer were also handled most softly.
“ProPublica’s stories alleging ‘corruption’ by Supreme Court justices have been the work of one-sided activists trying to make hay out of insignificant or irrelevant matters,” RealClearInvestigation’s Mark Hemmingway tweeted. “It’s not respectable journalism.”
[…]The Wall Street Journal, the same publication that published Alito’s preemptive defense against the leftist ProPublica attack, has an editorial features editor James Taranto who called ProPublica’s investigative efforts against conservatives “propaganda, not journalism.”
“The objective isn’t to further public understanding but, in Alinskyite fashion, to incite animus against a political target,” the Journal’s James Taranto wrote May 4, referencing leftist activist and author Saul Alinsky, who infamously wrote “Rules for Radicals.”
“The clearest proof of this is the absence of investigations from ProPublica and other so-called mainstream news outlets into the ‘ethics’ of liberal justices,” Taranto added.
What Mack and the people he quoted fail to do, however, is offer any evidence that any claim ProPublica made against Alito is false in any way. That’s why they attack the outlet’s purported “leftist” bias and the alleged irrelevance of the allegations. One can also argue that Newsmax and other right-wing outlets have used Alinsky tactics in targeting the Biden administration in general and Hunter Biden in particular. Also, Taranto’s complaint that “ProPublica and other so-called mainstream news outlets” have not sufficient looked into alleged ethics issues involving liberal justices rings hollow, since clearly those issues have already been reported. ProPublica’s work on Alito and Clarence Thomas involved issues not previously known — and if Mack and Taranto had their way, they would remain secret.
Indeed, Mack continued to attack ProPublica for the offense of reporting something right-winger didn’t want people to know, hyping “the big left dollars flowing into the ProPublica coffers to attack conservatives” while failing to mention the right-wing dollars that pay the salaries of Taranto and himself.
This was followed by an article the same day by Luca Cacciatore claiming that “The Sandler Foundation, a left-leaning group that launched the ProPublica media outlet, has a history of giving millions to organizations attacking conservative Supreme Court justices.” Cacciatore didn’t mention that his employer was founded by money from right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.