THE PRESS AND THE CONSTITUTION

Howard Bashman has a good line on the media's failure to cover constitutional issues:

The sad truth is that many major news organizations wish that they could provide more coverage of constitutional issues, but they fear that they will have to "dumb it down" to such a degree to make it understandable to the average viewer that it's not worth the effort.

Howard thinks that the press does the public a disservice by underestimating their capacities, and I think that he's right. As the NYT's Linda Greenhouse has argued, however, the major news outlets have made a choice to cut back on full time "beat" reporters at the Supreme Court, and now can only cover constitutional issues that reach the Supremes in a superficial manner. One could go on about this: the length, structure, and argument of the Court's opinions are not easily digestible by non-initiates; the prevailing culture of expertise acts as a kind of gatekeeper to constitutional argumentation, keeping out the non-expert public. So covering judicial interpretations of the Constitution and translating them for public consumption has to be a full-time job, and there are few news companies that are willing to make that kind of investment.

That's a shame, but it's a choice that the media has made on a lot of fronts. Foreign correspondents are also less prevalent than they used to be. It's depressing, perhaps, but an apt metaphor: no permanent correspondent at the Court, no permanent correspondent in Istanbul or Cairo. The Constitution really is like a foreign country as far as the major media outlets are concerned!