Founded as St. Louis Journalism Review in 1970
Just a week after media gave prime coverage to the success of women during the general election and examined the power women have as voters, we see a backslide in how women are portrayed in media.
A column written by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Bill McClellan touched a nerve in at least one reader, who wrote a letter to the editor that begins: “I was startled to read Bill McClellan’s column, ‘Crime Czar,’ in which he declared that the solution to a perceived crime epidemic was to ‘declare martial law and suspend the Constitution’ and to mandate ‘racial profiling,’ ‘frisking … young black men’ without cause. He also thought it a good idea to jail African-American women, bridging both racial and gender bigotry.”
True confession: Gateway Journalism Review’s staff is made up of political junkies with long traditions of monitoring election-evening results. Our own political media monitoring likely mirrors that of much of the American population. So, at the risk of being too introspective, here is how GJR staffers spent Tuesday evening.
The conviction of former Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich on 17 federal criminal counts on Monday is not surprising in light of the high percentage of convictions that federal prosecutors win in retrials of white-collar crimes after they have a chance to streamline complicated cases to appeal to juries.
A jury found Blagojevich guilty of 17 counts of wire fraud, attempted extortion, bribery, extortion conspiracy and bribery conspiracy. He was acquitted on one bribery charge, and the jury deadlocked on two counts of attempted extortion.
Justice Samuel Alito didn’t direct his remarks at the press when he spoke to a ballroom full of lawyers in St. Louis. But it was clearly the press he had in mind when he described the misconceptions that people have about the Supreme Court.
Alito even singled out for criticism the star Supreme Court reporter of the past generation, Linda Greenhouse, who writes a column about the court in her retirement from the New York Times. He noted that Greenhouse had wondered in her column about “topsy-turvy world” Supreme Court where business had not won as high a percentage of cases this term as in the past.
“Maybe the law has something to do with it,” said Alito with some sarcasm. “Maybe the text has something to do with it. I know that is a radical thought.”