Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap the media reaction to three major SCOTUS rulings, question the New York Times’ editorial judgment, and cover more media misses.

Another Round of SCOTUS-Related Liberal Panic

Three rulings from the Supreme Court last week on student-loan debt, affirmative action, and religious expression kicked off yet another news cycle of Court doomsaying.

The Court ruled last week that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the six-justice majority, “The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

NPR took the decision as an opportunity to frame affirmative action as having “divided Asian Americans and other people of color.” The article includes a subheading that suggests the “myth of affirmative action harming Asian Americans creates ‘deliberate racial wedge between communities of color.’”

OiYan Poon, a professor at Colorado State University, told NPR there is “no evidence that there’s a practice of anti-Asian discrimination.”

Meanwhile, a cert petition filed by the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., suggests that an African-American applicant in the fourth-lowest academic decile has a higher chance of acceptance than an Asian-American applicant in the top decile, while an Asian-American student in the fourth-lowest decile has less than a 1 percent chance of acceptance.

Atlantic writer Jemele Hill accused Asian Wave Alliance president Yiatin Chu of carrying water for white supremacy by supporting the end of affirmative action.

Chu posted that she told her daughter that “today is a big day. They’ve ended affirmative action.” She said her daughter asked, “Isn’t that what you’ve been fighting for?” to which Chu replied, “Yes.”

Hill replied to the post and wrote:

Liberal pundits wasted no time suggesting that the decision would quickly bring us back to the Jim Crow era.

“Next up the GOP’s Supreme ‘Court’ will strike down the Civil Rights Act to allow Jim Crow segregation to start again. Please don’t dismiss this as being over the top. This so called court ended reproductive freedom, gutted the Voting Rights Act and ended affirmative action,” MSNBC contributor Dean Obeidallah said.

Former White House aide Keith Boykin took aim at Justice Clarence Thomas, who voted with the majority in the case but did not write the majority opinion, saying, “Clarence Thomas benefited from affirmative action his entire life. But George Bush claimed his race had ‘nothing to do with’ his selection to succeed Thurgood Marshall. And now Thomas casts the vote to kill affirmative action for all other Black folk.”

The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg reacted to the decision with a predictable level of fear mongering.

“When you have a justice who says something as ridiculous as ‘I don’t get it,’ it just makes an Asian kid, a Native American kid, a Black kid feel like you don’t matter. Like you don’t understand why my struggle is hard. Or your struggle or your struggle. Is it leading to no women in colleges soon? Who knows,” she said.

Goldberg’s remark came days after co-host Sunny Hostin suggested that GOP leaders are “lowering their intellect” to “attract people that don’t have the analytical skills that they need.” She claimed Republicans “rely on the fact that our educational system is a mess, that they’re pulling books off of shelves.”

“It’s almost as if they want a permanent underclass. I just can’t abide by that,” she continued. Joy Behar criticized Republicans who “enable the stupidity.”

For all the histrionics over the affirmative-action decision, Democrats and the mainstream media still found plenty of time to sound alarms and spread misinformation about the Court’s decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The Court ruled in that case that a Christian web designer cannot be compelled to create a wedding website for a same-sex couple.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed Lorie Smith, the web designer in question, only got into the business “for the purpose of provoking a case like this” when asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if there was any “merit” to Smith’s argument.

“No, there isn’t, and I think it’s very revealing that there’s no evidence that this web designer was ever even approached by anyone asking for a website for a same-sex wedding,” Buttigieg said. “It appears this web designer only went into the wedding business for the purpose of provoking a case like this and in that sense, I think there is something in common with the Supreme Court ruling and what we’ve seen happening in state legislatures in the country, which is kind of a solution looking for a problem.”

“The fact that this was relief from a situation that may have never happened in the first place tells you everything you need to know about this agenda to use every instrument of government, courts and legislatures, to claw back at these rights for people who were just trying to go about their lives and just trying to be treated equally by businesses and by the government,” he added.

Buttigieg’s comments echo a report from The New Republic that suggested Smith’s counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom made up a request by a same-sex couple that was included in the case. The outlet found that two men named in a court filing by ADF were unaware they were mentioned in the filing and had not requested that Smith make them a website.

But in fact, Smith received the inquiry in question one day after filing a preemptive lawsuit challenging the accommodation clause of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. The case did not rest on the request.

NR’s Caroline Downey fact-checked the claims:

But according to the filing, someone who identified themselves as “Stewart” contacted Smith on September 21, 2016 asking for her help with his wedding to “Mike” “early next year.” The inquiry said the couple would be interested in “some design work done for our invites,” place names, and potentially a website. Stewart included his contact information on the request.

Kristin Waggoner, CEO and general counsel at ADF, suggested during a press call Friday that the request sent through the form on Smith’s website was made by someone posing as Stewart. It is “undisputed” however that the request was received, she said, whether it was from “a third party or a troll.”

The Washington Post quickly followed up with its own reporting on the claims as the issue gained traction among Democrats.

Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) shared that reporting in a tweet and wrote:

Meanwhile the media quickly got to work misrepresenting the Court’s decision.

CBS News tweeted and then deleted a post saying, “BREAKING: The Supreme Court rules in favor of a Colorado web designer who said her religious beliefs prevent her from taking on same-sex couples as clients.” A follow up tweet featured this correction: “An earlier version of this tweet has been deleted. The new tweet clarifies the designer’s beliefs are specific to weddings.”

Axios shared a similar sentiment: “BREAKING: Businesses can refuse to serve same-sex couples if doing so would violate the owners’ religious beliefs, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.”

MSNBC’s headline claimed in an on-air graphic: “Supreme Court: Web Designer Can Refuse LGBTQ+ Clients.” PBS NewsHour reported, “Supreme Court rules for Christian graphic designer who didn’t want to work with gay couples.”

The liberal justices emerged as heroes in the mainstream media for dissenting against these “profoundly wrong” rulings. To hear the Daily Beast tell it, Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a “withering dissent” in a “gay discrimination case.” The Hill reports, “Sotomayor blasts court in scathing dissent on same-sex wedding case.”

The headlines are part of a long history of the mainstream media lauding Sotomayor for her “scathing” dissents.

Rolling Stone cheered on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who wrote a “scathing” dissent in the affirmative action case that “Bashes ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ Conservatives.’”

Meanwhile, CNN host Sara Sidner also used the religious-expression case to make her own comparisons to Jim Crow laws.

“What is your reaction to this and what the fallout may well be?” Sidner asked CNN correspondents. “A lot of people worrying about things like Jim Crow. Could somebody decide that they want black folks to come in the back door because they don’t want them in their store? I mean, how far might this go?”

In a third case, the Court struck down President Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness program after finding that the president lacked the authority to forgive student loans for entire categories of borrowers under the HEROES Act.

While the president himself previously said in 2021 that he didn’t believe he had the authority to cancel student loans “By signing with a pen,” he called the Court’s decision “unthinkable.”

ABC’s Jonathan Karl noted during an interview with Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said just two years ago, “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay, but he does not have that power. That would — that has to be an act of Congress.”

Khanna replied by saying Pelosi’s comments came before the president requested a legal analysis of the HEROES Act.

“We can have an argument that the HEROES Act passed in 2003 in the wake of shortly after 9/11, it was way too broad of giving that kind of authority to the president and the secretary. I don’t believe that’s the case. That’s a legitimate argument. The place to make that argument is in the United States Congress. It’s not for unelected justices to override what the court has passed. And that’s what this court is doing. It’s very dangerous. They are basically reinterpreting congressional statute to fit their ideological preconceptions,” he said.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes suggested that while the 6–3 conservative majority has done “lots of very bad things,” with overturning Roe v. Wade being the “worst,” that “them deciding you are now $10,000 poorer than you were yesterday is really a helluva thing.”

Headline Fail of the Week

For those who are consumed with worry about their student-loan debt, New York Times columnist Ron Lieber offered “Six Ways You Can Still Cancel Your Federal Student Loan Debt.” Nestled among those solutions sits an unlikely suggestion: death.

The list starts off with reasonable suggestions including signing up for student-loan forgiveness and filing for bankruptcy before offering a final option that it acknowledges is “Not something that most people would choose as a solution to their debt burden.”

“Still, if you’re a young adult wondering about the federal PLUS loans your relatives took out to pay for your education, you may be wondering whether the debt dies with the person or people who take it on. It does,” Lieber adds.

After the suggestion went viral, the Times quietly changed its last subheading from “Death” to “Debt Won’t Carry On” and scrapped the line about death not being a solution most would choose.

Media Misses