High Court Justice Chides News Media

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gently took the news media to task Sunday.

Recalling that Justice Felix Frankfurter once urged the press to cover the court at least as well as the World Series, Ginsburg alluded to the current baseball strike in stating, “In 1994, for once his counsel was heeded.”

Speaking to an American Bar Foundation audience, Ginsburg said some news reports of actions in which Supreme Court review is denied make them sound like rulings on the merits of the cases. But such actions merely leave lower court rulings intact and don’t indicate any high court view of a dispute.

She added that entirely accurate reporting of judicial reports is difficult.