When Jodi Kantor’s New York Times When I published her story about the Alitos flag flying from 2021, I wondered why it took more than three years for this story to surface. It turns out that a well-known reporter, Bob Barnes of the Washington Post, looked into the issue at the time and realized there was no story there. Barnes is right.
Before continuing, I pause to express my personal regret that I did not write a letter to celebrate Barnes’s remarkable career. He will step down on December 31, 2023, after seventeen years in office. postal. (Bob told me he No Something must be written about the Chief Justice’s final address on the eve of New York. Bob will be greatly missed.
Justin Jouvenal and Ann Marimow both now write about the courts postalproviding details of what happened:
On January 20, 2021, the day of Biden’s inauguration, the Alitos did not attend, and Barnes went to their home to follow up on news about the flag. He met the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence and asked him to “get off my property.”
As he described the information he was looking for, she shouted: “This is an international distress signal!”
Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had originally left the community. The judge denied the flag was flown upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighbor dispute and said his wife had raised it.
Martha-Ann Alito then got out of her car and shouted, apparently referring to her neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed nearby. Returning to her car, she got out again and took out a novelty flag from her residence, the kind usually used to decorate gardens. She raised it to the flagpole. “There! Is this better?” she shouted.
Later that week, Samuel Alito issued a statement to The Washington Post in response to written questions asking whether it was his decision to fly the flag and whether it was done to protest the election results and reflect concerns about the state of the country. or other reasons.
“I did not participate in the flying of the flag,” he said, using almost identical language to a statement he provided to The Times last week. “Mrs. Alito placed it solely in response to a neighbor’s use of offensive and personally insulting language on a yard sign.”
Based on what I know about Alitos, this swap seems to be exactly what will happen.
Jouevanl and Marimow quoted a WaPo spokesperson as saying:
A Washington Post spokesman said the Post decided not to report the incident at the time because the flag-raising incident appeared to be the fault of Martha Ann Alito, not the judge, and was related to a dispute she had with her neighbors. The spokesman said it was unclear at the time whether the dispute was political in origin.
Why postal Have enough sense for the 2021 story, but era Have you run in 2024? I think era Serious error in judgment. In fact, there was overwhelming coverage of a non-story. Here, Kanter is so, so desperate to make a story happen that she stitches together random tweets and social media posts about flipping the flag to ignore the most likely and natural implications of Mrs. Alito’s actions. To this day, I have yet to see a single conservative who knows that the upside-down flag has anything to do with “Stop the Steal.” Even Ann Coulter doesn’t know!
I pay more attention to right-wingers than the average bear, and I had no idea that the inverted flag meant “stop the steal” – rather than what it always meant: a distress signal.
You’re making this up, @New York Times. pic.twitter.com/7EHMTRDXJt
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) May 17, 2024
There is no story here. There is never a story here. How much time have we wasted on this non-story.
The byline on this story means a lot. it does not include any eraSupreme Court reporter. They didn’t even contribute to the story. The article is signed by Jodi Kantor. I feel the same way about Jodi Kantor that I feel about Emily Bazelon. (For those who don’t remember, The Times admitted its mistake in 1985 when it assigned Bazleon to cover a story about Brett Kavanaugh throwing an ice cube at someone, whom she criticized on Twitter at the time Kavanaugh. That’s not to say you shouldn’t read their work, but you should do so with appropriate caveats. In fact, I talked to Bazlon more than I did to journalists. cautious.
The old Gray Lady is in trouble. To be clear, I’m talking about The New York Times.
I’d love to know the answer to another question. Are there any other outlets? Dobbs leaked before Politico Run with it?
