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CBS News has endured some questionable headlines of late—its old owners’ embarrassing settlement of a lawsuit brought by President Trump; its new owners’ apparent determination to put Bari Weiss, an anti-woke commentator whom Puck’s Dylan Byers recently credited with a “broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition,” in charge (and acquire her Free Press while they’re at it); a recent edict, following pressure from the Trump administration, that its Sunday show Face the Nation air interviews in full—and so the network was perhaps glad, yesterday morning, to be able to tout an exclusive: the Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett’s first TV interview since she was confirmed to the court five years ago next month. Other major outlets had tried and failed to land sit-downs with Barrett, who has a book out; she was apparently slated to appear on The Daily, the flagship New York Times podcast, only to cancel. In an era, however, when the prestige of linear TV is in question and the lines distinguishing it from other types of media are blurred, CBS did not land the first interview with Barrett, tout court, nor even the first of her book tour. (Not the first to be publicly presented, at any rate.) Indeed, that honor went to Weiss, who hosted Barrett for an event in New York last week. Ahead of time, the Free Press (which also published an excerpt from the book) said that Barrett’s “work on the bench reflects the kind of intellectual seriousness—and humility—we admire.” Onstage, Barrett returned the compliment, describing herself, in perhaps the most predictable utterance of 2025 so far, as a “huge fan” of the outlet. With friends like these, who needs to kick the shit out of the establishment?

In addition to the Free Press and CBS interviews, Barrett sat down with USA Today and has other public-facing events planned—but it is nonetheless rare for journalists to be able to put questions to a sitting justice, given that the latter tend mostly to express their thinking in written opinions from the bench (or, increasingly, not, but we’ll get to that later). In an ideal world, it would probably be for the best for jurists who hear sensitive cases, and judge them strictly on their legal merits, not to merrily mouth off in the media—and, like various colleagues past and present, Barrett has sought, on her book tour, to convince the public that we do indeed live in this ideal world, insisting that justices follow the law in good faith and are absolutely not politicians in robes. This, however, has always been a fiction, one that has now become all but impossible to credibly sustain—and, given that various justices have seemed quite happy to mouth off (or flag off) when it suits them, be that to excoriate the press or hawk a book, it hardly seems an unfair demand that they subject themselves to the journalistic scrutiny we expect of their robeless brethren. On the few occasions that they do, the discrepancies in their approach aren’t hard to spot. On CBS yesterday, for instance, Barrett declined to weigh in on the substance of various matters that could come before the court, but did seem prepared to state that Trump running for a third term would violate the Constitution. This might seem obvious, but again, these are not ideal times. 

In my years writing this newsletter, I’ve often returned to a lively and ongoing debate about court coverage that tracks this broader tension, namely, the criticism that old-school Supreme Court reporters have tended to treat the justices not as political actors, but as honest interpreters who see laws as sacred texts. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, a leading voice in this debate, argued in 2023 that the press corps covering the court had been “largely institutionalized” to hand off anything smacking of politics to politics reporters, and had, to some extent, “sublimated the Supreme Court’s own anxiety” about its legitimacy, rooted in the belief that “the worst possible thing that could happen is to have a Supreme Court that is a joke”; Jay Willis, another leading critic who helms the irreverent court-focused news site Balls and Strikes, has suggested that journalists have often overfocused on instances in which right-wing justices have appeared to stray from unanimous conservative orthodoxy, thus missing the forest of seismic rulings they have (more or less) agreed on. In more recent times, Barrett has become an avatar of this trend, with headlines in top outlets painting her, variously, as “the last best hope” for the court’s liberal minority and a “confounding” presence for left and right alike. According to Vanity Fair, Weiss brought up such coverage at her event last week, contrasting it with past portrayals of Barrett as a threat and asking, “Which is it?” 

The answer to that question, like the best Supreme Court coverage (and coverage of any story, for that matter), is not without nuance—it’s true that some liberals have seen cause for hope in Barrett’s record, that some Trumpers (including, apparently, Trump himself) have been frustrated by it, and that there is at least some statistical grounding for such conclusions. Ultimately, though—as the Times journalist Jodi Kantor, who wrote the story with the aforementioned “confounding” headline and statistical analysis earlier this year, noted in a recent write-up of Barrett’s sit-down with Weiss—Barrett has almost never voted with the court’s liberals in “major cases.” And while her book tour is taking in mainstream outlets, Willis argued last week that she will mostly sit before friendly interlocutors. Barrett appears to understand “the particular political and ideological persuasions of people” who are willing to pay for her book, Willis wrote. “A publicity tour that kicks off with an exclusive excerpt in the Free Press is a publicity tour designed to appeal to people who approve of this Court’s agenda, and are glad to express their appreciation by opening their wallets.”

That’s a shame because, perhaps now more than ever, there are sharp questions for the justices to answer. Recently, the court has faced a slew of criticism for enabling Trump’s agenda—parts of which would appear to be out-and-out illegal—not least in a major ruling, for which Barrett wrote the majority opinion, that a majority of justices used to curtail the ability of lower courts to issue sweeping injunctions while failing to address the substance underpinning the case at hand: Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional order unilaterally ending birthright citizenship. At least in that case we got a clear rationale—the court has also recently been criticized for overturning rulings against Trump on its so-called “shadow docket,” sometimes without so much as a word of explanation. Last week, in a sight even rarer than Supreme Court justices sitting for media interviews, ten federal judges complained anonymously to NBC News that such behavior has not only left them struggling to divine the court’s will, but allowed for the impression that the justices think they’re a bunch of anti-Trump hacks. Over the weekend, Stephen Breyer, who retired as a justice in 2022, made an unusual public intervention defending a lower-court judge who had been rebuked from the bench for supposedly failing to follow Supreme Court precedent. Any criticism from Breyer was predictably indirect, but various prominent commentators have been more forthright. Last week alone, The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser described the court as “Trumpified,” while Politico’s Ankush Khardori and Ezra Klein, of the Times, both attested to its extraordinary “deference” to Trump. Kate Shaw, a legal commentator and recent guest on Klein’s podcast, said that the court has, among other things, essentially allowed Trump to “refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress, remove heads of independent agencies protected by statute from summary firing, fire civil servants without cause, dismantle federal agencies, [and] call up the National Guard on the thinnest of pretexts.”

On the same episode of his podcast, Klein opened by referring to a widely shared essay that he published in the early days of this administration, making the case that observers shouldn’t take Trump’s various shocking actions at face value since, in doing so, they risk rhetorically imbuing him with powers he doesn’t have. Klein’s admonition was not aimed specifically at members of the press, but I noted at the time that it clearly applied to us; I broadly agreed that the media shouldn’t treat Trump’s power grabs as a fait accompli, but also noted a complicating factor: that time and again, Trump has been able to get away with things he really shouldn’t be able to do. One example that I cited was credulous coverage of the birthright citizenship order; fast-forward six months and Trump has not succeeded in implementing it, but neither has the idea been dismissed out of hand. Returning to his earlier essay last week, Klein noted that, for a time, his “bet looked sort of right,” with the courts intervening to curb Trump. The Supreme Court, however, has since reversed that trend.

A potential silver lining of this development, Klein argued, is that “maybe we’re not going to have the constitutional showdown many feared.” I also wrote about this fear in the early days of the administration, as talk of a “constitutional crisis,” and debate as to whether the US was in one or not, crested in the media; some experts argued that we were already at that point, with the administration appearing to have defied certain lower-court orders, but others cautioned that the sort of big-bang institutional conflict—the Supreme Court telling Trump to do something and him saying “make me,” for instance—that would signal a true crisis had yet to arrive, and straight-news reporters seemed reluctant to definitively use the term in their copy without attributing it to someone else. Since that moment, the debate seems to have quieted down somewhat, though from time to time, it gets revived. Search for the words “constitutional crisis” this morning, and the top results are all about Barrett: last week, Weiss prompted her to weigh in on the debate, and she dismissed the premise, adding, “I don’t know what a constitutional crisis would look like.”

Barrett did then offer up a definition—“We would clearly be in one if the rule of law crumbles,” she said, “but that is not the place where we are”—but her initial skepticism was actually sound: the concept of a “constitutional crisis” is nebulous, so much so, I argued earlier in the year, that the media coverage organized around it risked coming across as fussy, at best, unhelpful at worst. As some journalists did point out at the time, a constitutional crisis need not be ushered in by a big bang to be a crisis: one wisely noted that the idea exists as “a slope, not a switch”; others suggested that the court rubber-stamping Trump’s behavior might represent an even graver crisis than all-out conflict between the two. It is, to be sure, still early in Trump’s second term, and the court has yet to substantively weigh in on a whole host of matters. But it seems peculiar to me—even if I didn’t love the initial constitutional-crisis news cycle—that the volume seems to have been turned down now, given that, by really any credible definition, such a crisis is now here. (Whether the rule of law has yet “crumbled” is, perhaps, debatable, but the administration weaponizing it to go after its bêtes noires looks pretty crumbly to me.) Klein declared over the weekend, in a compelling essay headlined “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal,” that we have already entered the “authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency.” Inconveniently for a media industry that organizes coverage around defined “news pegs,” perceived novelty, and breathless “BREAKING NEWS” hype, such phases can be murky and repetitive and don’t always announce themselves explicitly (though Trump, a master of hype, announces his true intentions all the time). Many media critics have taken the press to task for not communicating the gravity of the threat with sufficient urgency or honesty. So far in Trump’s second term, I’ve been hesitant to endorse that conclusion, at least in its less nuanced forms. But it increasingly feels inescapable.

My hesitation was mostly grounded in the fact that it was still early, and in the clear-eyed coverage that I felt I had seen so far. But the latter often felt delayed itself, after years of more or less complacent media treatment of the institutional threat of Trumpism. And this observation did not apply only to Trump and his movement—as I wrote earlier this year, I also found the constitutional-crisis debate to be unhelpful because it risked obscuring the ways the US constitutional system might have been in crisis already, no few of which have been downstream of the flagrantly political conduct of the Supreme Court. Naive coverage of that conduct has been one form of long-running media complacency. There have been signs that such coverage has grown more hard-headed in recent years, though here, too, pinpointing a “big bang” inflection point is difficult. The death of Antonin Scalia, in 2016; the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, in 2022; and the growing scandal around justices’ extracurricular entanglements, in 2023, could all plausibly stake a claim. But none marked a total rupture with the media practice of putting justices on pedestals.

On CBS yesterday, there were moments to like in Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Barrett; on the whole, O’Donnell teased out at least some of the tension between the public’s increasingly political conception of the justices and the justices’ explicitly apolitical conception of themselves. Equally, however, it was possible to imagine a much more aggressive version of the interview that would have better met this moment—albeit, perhaps, not one to which Barrett would have agreed to subject herself. At one point, O’Donnell pointed out that Barrett is a “scholar of the Constitution” before reading her a section on the power of Congress to levy tariffs. “You’re a scholar of the Constitution, Norah,” Barrett replied, with a beaming smile. “You’re making me one,” O’Donnell laughed. In this exchange, Barrett was dodging a question that O’Donnell was right to put to her. Numerous bigger questions about the state of that Constitution, sadly, went unasked.

Other Notable Stories…
By Jem Bartholomew

• Eight months after the Trump administration began its assault on higher education, faculty and alumni at Columbia Journalism School are launching CollegeWatch, “a weekly newsletter whose mission is to report on what this campaign has unleashed, what it means, why it began, and where it might lead.” It will be edited by professor Michael Shapiro and adjunct professor Nushin Rashidian. Since taking office, the president has forced a number of prestigious colleges into deals: to pacify the White House, the University of Pennsylvania said it would ban transgender athletes from competing, Brown University agreed to pay $50 million over ten years to free up $500 million in research funding, and Columbia University said it would pay a $200 million fine to settle allegations of anti-Semitism in order to protect $1.2 billion in terminated or frozen research funding. Trump has frequently taken to social media to celebrate his victories over the Ivy League institutions. “American higher education is in the midst of a time unlike any other,” Shapiro said. “CollegeWatch’s mission is to capture the scope and toll of this assault.” You can subscribe here. 

• On August 31, blacked-out displays adorned newspaper front pages and websites across the world, as hundreds of media outlets from fifty countries took part in a solidarity campaign with Palestinian journalists, coordinated by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The campaign came after the Israeli killing, on August 10, of six journalists in a targeted strike on Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and, on August 25, the killing of five journalists in a “double tap” strike on a Gaza hospital. Jon Allsop wrote for CJR last week about the bombings—the Committee to Protect Journalists called the August 10 attack “murder. Plain and simple”—as well as the Israeli claim that it doesn’t target journalists “as such.” The RSF campaign reissued three major demands: the protection of Palestinian journalists and an end to the impunity for crimes against them by Israeli forces; immediate foreign press access to Gaza; and evacuation and safe haven for Palestinian journalists who wish to leave the coastal strip. Tomorrow sees the opening of the UN General Assembly. Israel’s brutal war on Gaza will be at the forefront of media attention, as multiple countries—including Israeli allies France, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Belgium—plan to declare recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN.

• It was a typical local news story. On August 21, Nottinghamshire Live, a UK online news site connected to the Nottingham Post, ran a piece about proposals to restructure local government. This was a plan by the newly elected Reform UK—a right-wing party that has controlled the Nottinghamshire County Council since May, and whose leader, Nigel Farage, is a Trump tribute act—over which, the site reported, there was internal disharmony. What happened next was dramatic, and straight from the populist playbook. Unhappy with the scrutiny, Reform UK’s forty-one elected councilors were banned from engaging with the Nottingham Post or Nottinghamshire Live. They were instructed to stop sending them press releases. The Post has been covering local government since 1878. Reform now says the ban “will only be lifted for emergency scenarios like flooding or incidents at council-run schools.” Nationally, Reform is leading the embattled Labour Party in the polls. Many fear the incident is a warning sign for how a right-wing, Farage-led administration would behave. CJR’s Jon Allsop wrote about the spread of Trump’s anti-press tactics here. “It’s a massive attack on local democracy,” said Natalie Fahy, the Post’s editor.

• There was a string of media job announcements at the end of summer. Chloe Malle will succeed Anna Wintour as Vogue editor, the publication announced last week. Malle, who has been editor of Vogue’s website and a podcast host, is head of editorial content effective immediately. But Wintour, who was editor for thirty-seven years, will remain chief content officer at parent company Condé Nast. (She’s even staying in her old office, the New York Times reports.) Elsewhere, Amy Rose Spiegel is now a senior editor at The Cut and is launching the new Personals newsletter, featuring “stories about sex and love from readers, contributors, and some of our most interesting friends.” The Wall Street Journal has hired former Tampa Bay Times investigative reporter Hannah Critchfield. Politico has hired Audrey Decker from Defense One to cover the space and emerging-technology beat. The Washington Post’s Trisha Thadani is moving beats, from tech to health. And Cameron Barr, formerly the managing editor of the Washington Post, has joined UK local news startup Mill Media as investigations editor.

• And a book has been published celebrating journalistic second mentions—or, as UK tabloid papers call them, “knobbly monsters,” apparently in honor of how a Sun reporter once wrote about a crocodile attack. In their book The Little Book of Second Mentions: The Art of Avoiding Repetition, Juliet and Matthew Maguire catalogue a journalistic convention that they say generates outpourings of creativity. The book is based on the couple’s X account. Some examples: The second mention of a beaver? “Dam-building rodents.” An onion? “The layered foodstuff.” A fox that ran onto a soccer pitch? “The four-legged interloper.” Asparagus? “The dainty spears.” Second mentions, the authors argue, can be deployed to enhance writing. For instance, in an article on Justin Timberlake’s recent arrest: “the ‘Cry Me a River’ singer.” But the most creative second mentions seem to be reserved for Trump. From 2024: “the orange-faced US presidential candidate” and “the Home Alone 2 star.” From 2023: “the failed casino operator.” Or, from 2022: “the thrice-married, oft-sued, twice-impeached and extensively legally imperiled former president.”

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