Petition: NYT, CNN, WaPo Must Name SCOTUS a Captured Court

On a single day this week, the Supreme Court's six-justice conservative supermajority handed down three rulings that tell a clear, cohesive story. It struck down Hawaii's gun safety law 6-3, siding with the gun rights lobby and the Trump administration. It shielded Monsanto from cancer liability in a 7-2 ruling, effectively blocking tens of thousands of plaintiffs from holding the company accountable for Roundup's alleged harms. And it ruled 6-3 to allow the Trump administration to strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians — people fleeing countries the State Department itself warns Americans never to visit — ruling that courts have no authority to review how those decisions are made. Each ruling went against ordinary people and in favor of powerful interests: the gun lobby, a corporate agrochemical giant, and an administration pursuing mass deportation.

Yet the New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and other mainstream outlets continue to cover these decisions as isolated legal developments — discrete rulings to be summarized and moved past, rather than pieces of a pattern that demands explanation. The pattern is not subtle. A court whose majority was built by right-wing legal organizations and confirmed by a Republican Senate majority is, term after term, expanding gun rights, shielding corporations from accountability, stripping protections from vulnerable immigrants, and curtailing the power of courts to check the executive. That is not jurisprudence. That is an agenda.

We call on The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and other mainstream outlets to cover the Supreme Court as what it has become — a captured institution advancing far-right and corporate interests at the expense of public safety, environmental accountability, and human rights. The public deserves reporting that connects the dots across rulings, terms, and decades, and that treats the Court's transformation as one of the most consequential political stories of our time.