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Opinion: The sphinx speaks—ill of the press

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Business Week has a fascinating Q and A with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas under the infelicitous headline ‘Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks’ -- an echo of ‘Garbo Talks’ that will be read as an allusion to Thomas’ role as the sphinx of the court’s oral arguments.

I found the interview, which focuses on Thomas’ student days at Holy Cross College, fascinating both for Thomas’ textured view of affirmative action and for the tribute he pays to the Jesuit who served as a mentor to him and other African-American students at Holy Cross. As a fan of Catholic schools and someone who also was also mightily influenced by a member of a Catholic religious order, I also share Thomas’ wistfulness about the days when Catholics schools weren’t dominated by lay teachers.

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But Thomas doesn’t help himself with a very untextured exercise in media criticism. It’s common knowledge that he has issues with press coverage of his career going back to his Senate confirmation hearings. But does the justice really believe that ‘the media, unfortunately, have been universally untrustworthy because they have their own notions of what I should think or I should do.’ Thomas was presumably referring not only to the complaint that he’s not ‘black’ enough in his views but also to the stereotype that is a clone or puppet of another conservative justice, Antonin Scalia.

But the press has not been ‘universally’ critical of Thomas. Two prominent journalists—Jan Crawford Greenburg and Juan Williams—have written sympathetically and counter-stereotypically about Thomas. As for the Scalia-clone canard, The Times’ David Savage, among others, has pointed out that Thomas and Scalia sometimes part company on important questions, such as whether the federal government has the ability to regulate medical marijauna within a state.

‘Universally untrustworthy?’ To quote Chief Justice John Marshall, that’s an idea ‘too extravagant to be maintained.’

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