NYT Interviews Me About "A Double Standard For 'Conservative' and 'Liberal' Labels?
"Josh, I think there’s real truth to your critique and it’s something we need to do a better job on."
Back in February, I submitted a letter to the editor of the New York Times objecting to how I was often labelled as a "conservative" even as liberal law professors did not receive that label. The Times did not publish the letter, so I posted it on the blog. I thought that was the end of the matter, but I was wrong. Patrick Healy, is the assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, reached out to me. He was starting a newsletter and podcast that responds to reader concerns. We spoke for about fifteen minutes about this issue.
That interview has now been posted here. It begins this way:
PATRICK: So Josh, you reached out after The Times twice described you as a, quote, conservative, end quote, law professor. And you said the conservative label was accurate, but that The Times applies labels like conservative and liberal inconsistently to law professors and analysts, and that a scholar's view should speak for itself. I'd welcome you unpacking that.
JOSH: Sure. This has been a longstanding grievance of mine, and not just against The Times, against all the major media outlets. I'll frequently talk to a reporter and they'll say something like, "How would you identify yourself?" And they're not asking for my pronouns. They're trying to get at my politics. And sometimes I'm of course like, you know, "I'm a law professor." And they say, "Well, how do you characterize yourself?" It's like, "Well, I'm a constitutional law professor," and I know what they're getting at. Eventually I just say, fine, if you want to call me conservative, you can.
And I suspect the reason why they do this is to give their readers sort of a grounding of where I'm coming from. And if this was sort of a neutral policy that's applied across the board, I wouldn't have much ground to object, but I find that it's not.
Back in February of this year, I was quoted twice in The New York Times back to back in the span of 24 hours, which is, you know, pretty cool. But I sort of noticed that both of the references were to Josh Blackman as a "conservative" law professor. And I just thought that was strange. So I went through the Westlaw archives and just sort of searched for "liberal" law professors and "conservative" law professors in the New York Times database, and it was far more likely that you're identifying a conservative than a liberal. And those numbers are stacked because liberals are quoted even more often. So the numbers even have a greater disparity.
And this sort of reinforces, I think, a perception that both the academy and frankly the media views a liberal position as a neutral position. And the conservative position is the other, the outlier. And that's why you have to have this sort of nomenclature, this sort of adjective to describe it. So I wrote a letter to the editor back in February. You did not publish it. OK. That's your prerogative, but I do appreciate the chance that you reached out to me and I'm glad to talk with you about it right now.
PATRICK: Yeah. Josh, I think there's real truth to your critique and it's something we need to do a better job on. It's kind of exactly what you said in terms of why we do it. We're trying to give readers more factual context about who's speaking or why their views rise to the level of a story. Sometimes it's notable that it's a conservative legal scholar criticizing President Trump's politics more than it might be surprising that a liberal is doing that.
Read the whole interview. I thought Healy was very fair. I hope journalists at the Times and other outlets give more consideration to this issue.
It's been a busy week for the mainstream media. I was also interviewed by NPR for All Things Considered about the Supreme Court publisher recusals.