On May 16 of this year, just a couple of weeks ago, The New York Times ran a stunning story written by ace reporter Jodi Kantor. The story, which included photos, said that on Jan. 17, 2021 — just a week after the insurrection at the Capitol and just days before Joe Biden’s inauguration — an upside-down American flag was displayed in the yard at the Arlington, Virginia, home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
The upside-down flag was a symbol that many supporters of Donald Trump used to falsely claim the election was stolen from Trump. Such flags were seen at the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Alito told the Times that he had nothing to do with the flag. He told the Times, “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
It was not only a big-time scoop, but a disturbing story, seeing as how Alito is part of a court that rules on cases involving the 2020 election and the events of Jan. 6.
One question that came up was the timing of the story. Why was the Times just writing about this now, more than three years after it happened? The Times told me in a statement last week, “We don't hold news. We published the story shortly after interviewing eyewitnesses and acquiring and vetting the image and other information.”
But, it turns out, The Washington Post actually knew about the Alito flag story at the time it happened and didn’t publish it.
A story written by Post reporters Justin Jouvenal and Ann E. Marimow and published this past Saturday included comments made back in January of 2021 by Martha-Ann Alito. Mrs. Alito spoke with a Post reporter then, but the quotes never appeared in the Post until this past weekend.
The new story included this almost-hard-to-believe passage:
The incident documented by reporter Robert Barnes, who covered the Supreme Court for The Post for 17 years and retired last year, offers fresh details about the raising of the flag and the first account of comments about it by the justice’s wife.
The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.
Semafor’s Ben Smith and Max Tani did more digging on this and reported that Cameron Barr, a former senior managing editor at the Post, said the decision to not run the story was a matter of “consensus,” which included the reporter, Robert Barnes. Barr, however, took responsibility for not running the story. Semafor reported that Marty Baron, the top editor of the Post at the time, was unaware of the story.
Barr told Semafor, “I agreed with Bob Barnes and others that we should not do a single-slice story about the flag, because it seemed like the story was about Martha-Ann Alito and not her husband.”
Smith and Tani wrote for Semafor, “Instead, Barr said, he suggested a story on the bitter neighborhood dispute that Alito told them had prompted his wife to raise the flag. They would use the flag itself, he thought, as a detail in the story. But that story never took shape.”
Barr told Semafor, “In retrospect, I should have pushed harder for that story.”
The Post’s decision to not initially publish the story looks even worse now that the Times broke the story and then published a follow-up that Alito’s vacation home in New Jersey just last year had an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, another flag carried by Trump supporters on Jan. 6. That flag, the Times wrote, is “now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.”
Ben Smith, in his piece for Semafor, noted that coverage of the Supreme Court can be divided into two eras. He wrote, “pre-Dobbs and post-Dobbs — or, more specifically, into the period before and after May 2022, when Politico published a leaked draft of the decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade’s federal protection of the right to an abortion. The leak and its aftermath exposed the court’s internal politics and further damaged its carefully-cultivated reputation as an institution above the partisan fray.”
Smith also noted, “Barnes, who is now retired, was part of a generation of Supreme Court reporters made up largely of institutionalists who afforded justices a level of distance from the day-to-day of political coverage unknown to almost any other contemporary government figures.”
Barr told Semafor, “Stories about the court are different than they used to be.” And Semafor added, “The Post’s move was cautious and deferential, and very pre-Dobbs. Now, it’s hard to imagine.”
That’s true. But it’s honestly hard to imagine sitting on that story back in January 2021 — and all the days up until The New York Times broke the story two weeks ago.
