The Tennis Tempest At ABC

by Brent Bozell - Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 - TownHall.com

A few facts from Bozell's article:
1. Antonin Scalia assembled a 481 page packet of judicial information for a conference.
2. At this judicial conference Scalia taught for 10 hours before lawyers who were there to understand more about our courts and fulfill their continuing education requirements.
3. Scalia received no honorariaum for the conference.
4. While at the conference, Scalia played tennis for 2 hours.
5. ABC TV excoriated Scalia for taking a tennis junket as part of a so called expose on judicial abuse of trips.

Brent Bosell's article is a good article, but none of the above facts except the last are mentioned until deep in the article. Here is his opening.

If you thought Teddy Kennedy's pratfall over Samuel Alito's membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group was embarrassing (quoting magazine satire articles as if they were real), you should see what ABC's "Nightline" tried to pull last week.

The subject was the ethics of judicial travel. As investigative reporter Brian Ross explained in the middle of the piece, "Justices at all ends of the political spectrum take plenty of these trips to lots of nice places, all paid for by somebody else."

With the above background this is a good article and I highly recommend it. However the lead information Bozell chose does not make his article's point clear until quite late in the article. Sometimes I wonder whether conservative writers are more interested in attacking the mainstream media than in communicating their facts.