FLASHBACK: Media Tears After Ginsburg Death Tipped Court to the Right

Four years ago this week, the media elite despaired at the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was 87 and had been in ill health for years. Not only did journalists openly admire the progressive spin Ginsburg brought to the Court, they also fretted a quick pre-election confirmation of a nominee selected by Republican President Donald Trump would soon unravel Ginsburg’s liberal legacy.

Long before her death, the media had revered Ginsburg as a left-wing legal icon. “She has been called the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s rights movement,” CBS’s Charlie Rose hailed in October 2016.

“Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become nothing short of a pop culture phenomenon,” NBC’s Craig Melvin gushed on Today in February 2019. A few months later, CBS’s Nikki Battiste joyously introduced a piece about a Ginsburg appearance at the University of Buffalo: “We start off with one of my favorite women.” Co-host Gayle King heartily agreed: “Everybody loves her!”

Ill with pancreatic cancer, Ginsburg died September 18, 2020. “President Trump has said that he would nominate a successor and Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate has said that they would try to act on a confirmation for a successor,” NBC correspondent Pete Williams explained during his network’s breaking news coverage that night.

Media liberals, of course, were still fuming about how Senate Republicans in 2016 blocked the a Democratic replacement after the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. During MSNBC’s breaking news coverage on September 18, Rachel Maddow commiserated with ex-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton about the unfolding “feminist catastrophe.”

“We ended up with Justice [Neil] Gorsuch instead of Justice Merrick Garland. I think a lot of the emotion around that in the country was, in part, that the Republicans and Mitch McConnell had done something that really did feel like it broke the system,” Maddow told Clinton. “But it also felt like a feminist catastrophe in you not becoming the first woman president, despite Justice Ginsburg’s fervent belief that you would be.”

The next morning, the broadcast networks jumped to celebrate Ginsburg. “What a life it was! What a legacy it was!” ABC’s Terry Moran exclaimed on Good Morning America. “Her character, her intellect, her fierce determination to see the words ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’ made real for Americans, changed America. Overnight crowds gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court to mourn the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 87 years old. So many young people there, saying goodbye to a most improbable pop icon.”

Over on NBC’s Today, co-host Peter Alexander noted Ginsburg’s Jewish faith: “By Jewish tradition, a person who dies on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, as it was yesterday, is a person of great righteousness.”

“Well, righteousness is an apt description,” correspondent Andrea Mitchell echoed. “Strength, incredible strength. This woman was so determined, she could do anything!”

The Washington Post’s banner headline that morning praised Ginsburg as “A Pioneer Devoted to Equality.” Four years earlier (February 14, 2016), the same newspaper’s headline after the death of conservative Antonin Scalia was scornful: “Supreme Court Conservative Dismayed Liberals.”

Some journalists reacted as if a beloved family member had died. “Me and the girls get into the car. We are waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,” actress Ali Wentworth related the following Monday (September 21) on on ABC’s Live with Kelly and Ryan. Talking about her husband, Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos, Wentworth continued: “He finally comes in. He bursts into tears. ‘Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died.’...We sat there in the parking lot, crying for 45 minutes.”

Amid the tears, the media mobilized to fight any conservative replacement. “Democrats can’t just threaten: they have to mean it,” threatened Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC’s AM Joy, September 19. “It’s time for Democrats to step up, and use everything in their power to ensure that if Mitch McConnell and President Trump do what we all believe and know they’re going to do, that there will be a price to pay no matter who wins the election in November.”

During live coverage of a memorial service for Ginsburg on September 23, ABC’s congressional correspondent Mary Bruce channeled both grief and outrage: “I think for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s supporters and admirers on the left, especially many women across this country, it has been a week full of anguish, and also outrage at this fight to fill her seat.”

During NBC’s coverage of the same event, White House correspondent Peter Alexander argued it would be disrespectful for Trump to fulfill his constitutional duty to pick Ginsburg’s successor: “The President’s already made it clear that he’s not going to respect the ‘fervent wish,’ in the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself, that it would be the next president, the next president, who would ultimately determine who would replace her on the Court.”

Still, NBC’s congressional correspondent Kasie Hunt told anchor Lester Holt that, despite the tough talk, Democrats “don’t have very many options, Lester, and I get the sense that there is a sense of sadness, in some ways, that’s settled in with Democrats who realize there’s nothing they can do to give Ruth Bader Ginsburg her dying wish.”

Three days earlier, Fox and Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt had reminded her audience that Ginsburg herself had embraced the idea of Presidents sending up nominations in an election year: “If you look back at what she told The New York Times in 2016: She said, ‘That’s their job. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being the President in his last year.’”

On Saturday, September 26, Trump tapped federal judge Amy Coney Barrett as his choice to replace the late Justice. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos highlighted the self-serving “criticism from Democrats, including Joe Biden, who said that Judge Barrett could be a threat to the Affordable Care Act, also says it shouldn’t even be voted on until after the election. And several Democratic senators saying this is an illegitimate sham process.”

On that evening’s Nightly News, NBC’s Hallie Jackson suggested Barrett’s religious views were possible reason to reject her: “Her Catholic faith, a core value, and central to questions about how she’d rule on issues like abortion.”

A distressed Jeffrey Toobin opined on CNN: “The judicial philosophies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is, who has, departed, and Amy Coney Barrett could not be more different under our system. And so the difference for reproductive freedom, for health care, for gun control or the absence thereof, affirmative action, so many issues, her views will be diametrically opposed to Ruth Ginsburg’s.”

Over on MSNBC, Slate senior editor and legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick, also slammed Barrett as extreme: “Whether it’s doing away with the ACA [the Affordable Care Act], doing away with Roe, expansive gun rights, limiting environmental protections — public polling is way, way out of step with where she is....Those are not values, I think, that the majority of Americans share.”

In the end, of course, Judge Barrett was confirmed on October 26 by a vote of 52-48, with all Democrats voting ‘no’ and all Republicans voting ‘yes.’ There’s no doubt that, if the parties were reversed, the media would have championed the rights of Democrats to ram through an election-year appointment to push the Court in a more liberal direction — because that’s exactly what they attempted in 2016.

For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.