Scotusblog loss of Senate press credentials fuels media uproar

It is widely praised for doing what no other news organisation can. But now Scotusblog may lose what hundreds of other publications take for granted: access to the Senate.

Scotusblog, a website dedicated to coverage of the US supreme court, is preparing to mount an appeal Friday morning to a decision last month by the Senate press gallery not to renew its press credentials. The gallery granted Scotusblog credentials in 2013.

The blog’s reporters appear likely to retain access to the supreme court through temporary arrangements. The court has traditionally honored Senate credentials but is currently reviewing its press procedures.

But the prospect that gatekeepers on Capitol Hill would see fit to restrict access to Scotusblog reporters set off a wave of protest, including an open letter from a press advocacy group and expressions of consternation and disbelief from media colleagues.

“It is a travesty that Scotusblog does not have full press accreditation,” said Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN and the New Yorker. “Scotusblog is absolutely essential to any serious student of the supreme court – journalist, litigator, scholar.”

Nina Totenberg, the legal affairs correspondent for NPR, called Scotusblog “essential for a working reporter” and said it was “absolutely” the feeling of colleagues that the blog deserved to be credentialled.

“It’s just an essential tool for anyone covering the courts, especially the supreme court,” Totenberg said. “And there is no other blog like it, and there is no publication like it.”

Decisions about press credentials are made by the standing committee of correspondents, an elected panel of five journalists with a continuously revolving roster. Scotusblog publisher Tom Goldstein, a seasoned supreme court litigator and a founding partner of Goldstein & Russell, planned to appear at an open meeting with the committee Friday to make his case.

‘We wanted the credential in substantial part because we cover supreme court-related matters in the Senate,” Goldstein wrote in a blog post last month.

Committee chairwoman Siobhan Hughes, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, declined to comment in advance of Friday’s meeting, as did committee member Emily Ethridge of CQ Roll Call and press gallery director Laura Lytle. The committee membership has partially turned over in the last year, with two new members joining in January.

Goldstein said that losing the credential could mean that the blog would not be able to send reporter Lyle Denniston, legendary among court reporters, to Capitol Hill to cover future court budget hearings or, possibly, a nomination hearing. Denniston is 83 years old and began covering the supreme court in 1958.

“Lyle Denniston has been covering the courts since Earl Warren was chief justice!” said Toobin. “Lyle is, without question, the dean of supreme court reporters. Who are they kidding?”

Denniston declined comment for this story.

Press credentials are reviewed, however, on an organisational and not individual basis. In declining last month to renew the site’s credentials, the members of the gallery questioned the blog’s editorial independence and need for access to the Senate. It was unclear, however, what had changed from a year earlier, when Scotusblog was given a pass.

“They have said what concerns them,” Goldstein said. “Why it should concern them is probably the subject of some disagreement … they’ve been quite circumspect. I think they view Friday as their opportunity [to comment].”

While Scotusblog today is recognized as an outlet with solid journalistic credentials, it was founded to serve a more mixed purpose. Goldstein and wife Amy Howe, a former litigator who now edits the site full-time, began publishing the blog in 2002 to support their law practice.

After nearly a decade of growing its pool of contributors and its audience, the blog attracted sponsorship from Bloomberg Law in 2011. Today the blog is wholly sponsored by Bloomberg, Goldstein said, and wholly separate from his law firm.

“The Bloomberg sponsorship let us separate completely from the law firm, so that was a big deal,” said Goldstein. “We adopted a series of firewalls, to make sure that the firm and the blog were separate actually and optically. So for example no member of the firm can write about any case that the firm is in, no member of the blog staff – nobody who’s paid by me or reports to me can write about any case in which the firm is involved.”

Goldstein’s dual role as publisher and litigator was criticized in 2010 by Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist. In a piece for Salon, Greenwald said the blog’s favorable – “obsequious” was the word he used – coverage of justices was a way for Goldstein to curry favor for when he would argue before the court.

“I don't think there's any evidence of it,” Goldstein said. “The reality is that we don't have a material amount of positive or negative coverage – if you look at the last 200 pieces on the blog, I think they just are descriptive.”

The blog employs “outside experts” to cover cases with a connection to his firm, he said, but “we outsource lots of coverage to experts in all events”.

Neither Totenberg nor Toobin saw any such conflict of interest for Scotusblog. “I’ve never known them, at least in modern times, to be anything other than completely upright and independent,” Totenberg said.

That opinion was joined by more than a dozen media outlets and advocacy groups that co-signed a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press urging the press gallery to heed the Scotusblog appeal.

“Scotusblog is a leading source of daily news and analysis about the court, and we believe that regulations that determine whether its reporters can receive permanent press passes to the US Senate, where stories pertinent to the court often arise, must be flexible enough to accommodate new and emerging forms of media ownership and revenue models,” committee director Bruce Brown wrote.

“We encourage this committee to recognize Scotusblog as a qualifying news organization that is staffed by professionals engaged in the practice of journalism.”