You're A Customer Cont.

I've been meaning to recommend Lauren Collins piece on Sonia Sotomayor over at the New Yorker. It's a sweeping piece and much more comprehensive than all the gossip-mongering we saw in the run-up to her confirmation. I guess I have to tell you that this blog is quoted in the piece, and add that that isn't the reason I'm recommending it. (though it always nice to be quoted in the New Yorker.)

In light of our discussions this week on reporters, and my continued interesting in fostering a critical and skeptical readership, I want to highlight this graff:

Despite Obama's praise, and photographs of Sotomayor's angelic mother, Celina Sotomayor, dabbing at her eyes during the press conference, the rollout got off to a slightly sour start. In early May, a widely read article by Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic, entitled "The Case Against Sotomayor," had quoted an anonymous source as saying that Sotomayor was "kind of a bully on the bench," "domineering," and "not that smart." The piece generated six hundred and forty-two comments on the magazine's Web site, many of them incensed. Rosen eventually softened his criticisms, but the insinuations lingered. The day after the nomination was announced, Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post that Obama had opted for "biography over brain." Many of the potshots were glancing (Newt Gingrich Tweeting that Sotomayor was a "Latina woman racist"), but the perception that Sotomayor was a temperamentally and intellectually invalid candidate, posited largely by backers of other candidates during the selection process, had infiltrated the debate.

The notion that Sotomayor somehow wasn't smart enough for her Supreme Court seat resonated with an ugly narrative about people of color and affirmative action. Put simply, I just don't believe that if she'd been white and from the Upper-East Side, that Rosen's objection would have rang out like it did.

Instead, here's John Derbyshire linking to Rosen's piece and calling Sotomayor "dumb and obnoxious." Here's Fred Barnes implicitly claiming that Sotomayor's scholastic honors are really the equivilant of a D-Plus. Here's Pat Buchanan attributing all of Sotomayor's accomplishments to her ethnicity, and dubbing her "Miss Affirmative Action 2009." Now Rosen is lot more scrupulous than the men who used his work, and I don't believe he shares their motivations or prejudices. But given how lackadaisical he was about his reporting, he has to share some of the responsibility for the meme's spread.

I bring that up again, not to slam Rosen but to, again urge skepticism. I caught Eugene Robinson on Hardball this morning, and was disappointed to find that he's basically taking the Clinton quote at face value and running with it. Again, Clinton may well have said it and meant it in a racist way, but it doesn't much matter. There really is no way to disprove it. If Clinton says he didn't say it, his critics (maybe not Eugene) will likely cite his track record and still not believe him.

Moreover, even if the quote was proven totally false, I'm not convinced there'd be any consequences. The book's authors aren't going to lose their gigs and the book wouldn't be pulled from the shelves. There's a tendency to rail against big media, and decry the lack of accountability. But the more interesting possibility is that we--as human beings--want to have our beliefs confirmed, that we ourselves, the customers, aren't interested in buying facts, so much as confirmation of the world as we already see it, with the veneer of "fact" layered over top.

I mean it when I say "we." Just yesterday, I saw this reporting on Mark Penn. How I'd love to write a post that says "We knew it all along." But did we?