A front-page news article in today's New York Times reports on President Clinton's decision to bypass Congress and make a "recess appointment" of a judge to the Fourth Circuit. The Times article reports that the Fourth Circuit "is also widely viewed as the most aggressively conservative of the appeals courts, often providing novel and cutting-edge rulings."
There they go with that passive voice again. "Widely viewed"? Widely viewed by whom? Couldn't the Times, with its vast reportorial resources, muster up even one law professor or lawyer to say this on the record? Otherwise, readers are left with the sneaking suspicion that this view is widely held only among the knee-jerk liberals with whom the Times associates. Never mind the contradiction between being "conservative" and providing "novel and cutting-edge rulings," a paradox that the Times doesn't even begin to explain.
The Times article goes on to report that the Fourth Circuit court "has blazed new trails in striking down laws that a majority of its judges say improperly enhance federal power at the expense of the states." Aha. The "novel" and "cutting edge" "new trails" to which the Times refers are in fact, then, not so new then at all, but an effort to restore the traditional constitutional interpretation of federal powers that was in place before it was thrown out of whack by liberal judges. Again, the Times makes no effort to explain any of this to its readers, instead leaving the false impression of a bunch of renegade "conservative" judges blazing "new trails." They aren't blazing new trails, they are trying to get the law back onto the old trail that it was on before it got lost.
This same Times article uses the "widely viewed" trick elsewhere, too. The article reports that, "Although the process by which senators block presidential nominations is partly secret, Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, is widely viewed as the main figure in foiling Mr. Clinton's efforts to name a black to the Fourth Circuit."
Again, "widely viewed" by whom? Readers would be better served if the Times named one person who held that view and described how the person arrived at that view.
The article doesn't quote a single person suggesting that "Mr. Clinton's efforts to name a black to the Fourth Circuit" have a whiff of racial tokenism about them. If a lawyer were so openly determined to name a black to a jury, or to strike one, it would be illegal. Smartertimes.com has no view on the judicial nominee's qualifications, and he may well be as qualified as Justice Thomas. But it seems like it would be widely viewed as an insult to any jurist to be selected because the president was determined to, as the Times puts it bluntly, "name a black to the Fourth Circuit."