Justice Kennedy: Staffer Asked to Review Student Story Without His Knowledge
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy says he didn’t realize a new staffer had demanded the right to review a story about his October speech to New York City school students.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy said he’s frustrated by all the criticism over the report. Kennedy said a new staffer had misinterpreted his policy that allows student newspapers to report on classroom visits, but bars outside media from the events. The ban on outside reporters, he said, is designed to avoid any embarrassment for students who sometimes ask questions that are “not too good.”
Kennedy, a First Amendment advocate, said he accepted responsibility “as the captain of the ship” for the request for a prepublication review for accuracy, but he’s frustrated by the suggestion that he has a double standard.
The original New York Times story accurately quoted a Supreme Court spokeswoman as saying a staffer in Kennedy’s office likely made the request for prepublication review in an effort to be helpful, but that detail got left out of some later reports that cited the Times.
Criticism mounted, and bloggers weren’t the only ones taking Kennedy to task. “My relatives call me from California, my family is all upset, and other people are calling me,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Kennedy said he did get an e-mail from the student newspaper at the Dalton School where he spoke asking for comment on the story before publication. But he assumed the students were fact-checking on their own initiative, the Wall Street Journal reports in a separate story.
Kennedy did find a misleading statement. The story said the word “liberty” did not appear in the body of the Constitution. “Well, that’s right, because we were talking about the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution, the 1789 version,” he said.
