The media are working overtime not just to prevent the eminently qualified Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the Supreme Court, but to destroy his life as well. One of their avenues is to make it impossible for him to coach girls’ basketball in the future.
USA Today’s Erik Brady wrote:
The U.S. Senate may yet confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but he should stay off basketball courts for now when kids are around…
The nation is deeply divided. Sometimes it feels like we don’t agree on anything anymore. But credibly accused sex offenders should not coach youth basketball, girls or boys, without deeper investigation. Can’t we all agree on that?
The article, which was illustrated with a picture of Kavanaugh and one of the girls’ basketball teams he coaches, has since been dramatically revised. Apparently editors at USA Today realized that calling a human being a pedophile with precisely zero actual evidence of any sexual impropriety was indefensible.
“This is disgraceful,” wrote Jedediah Bila. “The man was accused of atrocities with no evidence, no corroboration, no proof. He’s undergone 6 FBI investigations in his life. Maybe wait to criminalize someone till you have damn good reason? I’m utterly disgusted.”
But the media and other partisans have been setting out to destroy this aspect of the man’s life for a while.
Time magazine’s Molly Ball wrote what one critic called “possibly the most revolting innuendo yet in the Kavanaugh story, and that’s a high bar.”
Ball claimed the line about “legs bare in their private-school skirts” was not meant to say anything other than “the accusation complicates his aggressively pro-woman presentation. Nothing else was intended.” We should take her at her word, but what does it say that not a single editor or other adult at the publication realized how nightmarishly awful this line would come off?
It is apparently impossible for our media to realize that promulgating nothing more than decades-old hearsay with precisely no corroborating evidence is unbecoming and cruel. At the announcement of his Supreme Court nomination, Kavanaugh emphasized how coaching basketball helped create bonds with his daughters.
The media should throw out all their standards. The one’s they have stink. Then need the ones they used to have when they applied a little bit of integrity to their reporting.