Richard Wolf

The top of Friday's USA Today offered a sugary valentine to Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, hailed with the words “‘The People’s Justice.’” Underneath, the subhead added: “Supreme Court’s intrepid Sonia Sotomayor is liberal warrior on the bench and off.”

USA Today played up the Supreme Court's decision on Monday to hear the case of a bakery owner in Colorado who refused to participate in same-sex couple's wedding ceremony by baking the pair a cake. The newspaper spun the judicial branch's move in the lead sentence of their Monday article: "The Supreme Court agreed Monday to reopen the national debate over same-sex marriage." The publication also…

Today the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Associated Press's Scott Bauer reported, "turned away a challenge to Wisconsin's voter identification law," meaning that "the state is free to impose the voter ID requirement in future elections." Bauer then focused on the impact of the state's off-year primary elections on April 7. Bauer's relatively tolerable (for him) report tagged the law as "a political…

USA Today, gave the equivalent of almost a full page to Eric Holder's resignation in Friday's print edition. The paper's primary story by Gregory Korte, at the top right of the front page, described him as having "championed gay, civil, voting rights." The item's continuation on Page 8A included a quote from Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, which calls itself "America's…

USA Today reporter Richard Wolf's afternoon coverage of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision this afternoon appeared to be completely ignorant of the dire financial consequences which would have been visited on the company had it lost today. He also allowed unscientific and objectively wrong arguments about conception to be advanced by those who wanted to see Hobby Lobby defeated.…

In his story (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes — and in case it gets edited later today; Update: It did) on the Supreme Court's decision this morning upholding Michigan voters' 2006 approval of a ban on race-, ethnic- and gender-based preferences in university admissions, USA Today's Richard Wolf failed to identify the size of the court majority, which was 6-2.…

USA Today's Richard Wolf and Fredreka Schouten wasted no time this morning distorting the Supreme Court's April 2 ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC, which essentially holds that a provision of federal law setting an aggregate limit on an individual's campaign contributions violates the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Wolf and Schouten, however, practically endorsed the lament of…

Richard Wolf of USA Today can’t use the word “left” to describe recent Supreme Court rulings, only “right.” It came in a story headlined  “Supreme Court poised to tilt further to the right.” When the Court tacks left, it’s a “blockbuster” term of “landmark" decisions. Wolf began: “After two blockbuster terms in which it saved President Obama's health care law and advanced the cause of same-…

USA Today reporter Richard Wolf's Tuesday news story on President Barack Obama's vacation book reading list flattered Obama for his “smart” and “exquisite” choice in the five books the White House announced Monday he had picked to read. “Taken together, they are a smart collection for 'someone who really appreciates the written word,' says Susan Mercier, manager of Edgartown Books here,” Wolf…

In the February 4 USA Today, Richard Wolf treated news of Bush's last budget proposal by alternating between liberal Democrats attacking the president and Wolf's own stark language in characterizing the spending blueprint. What's more, Wolf cited two Democrats attacking the spending plan, compared to one Republican depending reductions in spending in the final Bush budget.An excerpt follows (…