In the wake of revelations that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, former CBS journalist and Fox News contributor Marvin Kalb appeared on Tuesday's Fox & Friends and flat-out rejected the notion that the media influenced the Roberts opinion or that media influence, especially from left-wing networks, has any adverse impact on national politics.
Nevertheless, he squeezed in a comment stating that the Obamacare decision was “truly important” in his interview with Gretchen Carlson, and also said it pained him as a old CBS hand to slam CBS reporter Jan Crawford, but that's what he "reluctantly" did.
Kalb stated that “to raise the issue about whether the media influences us is to say the sun is going to rise in the morning. Obviously, we all live in a world in which we're influenced by what we read, what we see on television, what we hear on radio. But that does not mean that Justice Roberts made up his mind to do something truly important because of the media.”
Glad to see we entered a no spin zone.
Furthermore, Mr. Kalb criticized the Supreme Court based of opinion polls. This has been one of the cornerstones of left-wing debasement of the most prestigious institution in the country. This worries Kalb who said “right now, according to late polls, it's a little more than 40% of the American people have the kind of respect for the Supreme Court that they once had. That's a bad thing. And that is probably the result of the sharp deterioration and political warfare between both major political parties." Heaven forbid we debate and argue about the future of our constitution and whether it will be able to constitute anything in the future.
However, the most egregious part of the interview centered on Kalb stating the Court’s prestige is suffering due to the conservative tilt of the court. Kalb had the gumption to state that “the Supreme Court tended to be seen over the last decade as more an arm of the Republican Party than it was something that stood above national politics to make up its mind.” Furthermore, “it appears to the public, because so many of these decisions seem to have run in a conservative direction rather than in a liberal direction, that the court had become too political. I'm not sure that's the case at all but that is certainly the perception.”
So if the court had a golden age of liberalism, the media and Mr. Kalb would see it as impartial.