Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Television News: A Critical Link between the Supreme Court and the American Public
- 2 The Supreme Court Beat: A View from the Press
- 3 Television News and the Supreme Court: Opportunities and Constraints
- 4 A Tale of Two Cases: Bakke and Webster
- 5 A Tale of Two Terms: The 1989 and 1994 Court Terms
- 6 “The Supreme Court Decided Today …” – or Did It?
- 7 Which Decisions Are Reported? It's the Issue, Stupid!
- 8 Television News and the Supreme Court: All the News That's Fit to Air?
- Appendix: Schedule of Interviews
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - A Tale of Two Cases: Bakke and Webster
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Television News: A Critical Link between the Supreme Court and the American Public
- 2 The Supreme Court Beat: A View from the Press
- 3 Television News and the Supreme Court: Opportunities and Constraints
- 4 A Tale of Two Cases: Bakke and Webster
- 5 A Tale of Two Terms: The 1989 and 1994 Court Terms
- 6 “The Supreme Court Decided Today …” – or Did It?
- 7 Which Decisions Are Reported? It's the Issue, Stupid!
- 8 Television News and the Supreme Court: All the News That's Fit to Air?
- Appendix: Schedule of Interviews
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
“One of the more unfortunate things about the Bakke case is that it became the vehicle for educating, or should I say miseducating, the public about affirmative action. The public learned about affirmative action almost, literally, for the first time through … ten-second sound bites on television, with people polarized against one another.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, while a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (in Blackside, 1989)“[F]ollowing Webster, some network reporters suggested a lockup, giving each reporter five minutes … to study the decision … so they could all report the decision more responsibly.”
Tim O'Brien, ABC NewsOn June 28, 1978, the Supreme Court issued its much anticipated ruling in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Allan Bakke, a white male, claimed that he was discriminated against by the medical school at the University of California at Davis (UC-Davis) because of his race. The celebrated case marked the Court's first full-scale effort to address the legality of publicly promulgated affirmative action programs, in this instance in the context of admissions processes at a professional school. More than a decade later, on July 3, 1989, the Court issued its decision in the similarly anticipated case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, dealing with the constitutionality of several provisions of a Missouri law that regulated and restricted a woman's right to obtain an abortion. This time the Court was not working on a clean slate, however, since it had revisited the issue of abortion rights many times in the wake of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 overturning a Texas antiabortion statute.
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- Information
- Television News and the Supreme CourtAll the News that's Fit to Air?, pp. 89 - 157Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998