CBS Highlights Study Claiming Supreme Court Justices Are Sexist

Nicholas Fondacaro | April 13, 2017
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***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***

To cap off Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, the network spotlighted a study by a pair of Northwestern University law professors who claim the United States Supreme Court is a sexist workplace based exclusively on who interrupts who. “And at the Supreme Court, women broke the glass ceiling. Now, if the men don’t mind, they’d like to have the floor,” argued Anchor Scott Pelley during the opening tease.

When the segment finally rolled around at the end of the show, Pelley quipped that “The first amendment guarantees the right to free speech, but is there a constitutional right to finish a sentence?”

“Since cameras are not allowed when the Supreme Court is in session, picturing interaction among the justices can be a challenge,” stated Jim Axelrod when he started his report, “But a new study coauthored by Northwestern law professor Tanja Jacobi suggests they might be more familiar than you think.”

He sat down with one of the co-authors of the study Tanja Jacobi, who claimed that “Female justices are interrupted about three times as often as male justices.” From there Axelrod played audio from a 2013 affirmative action case, Fisher v. The University of Texas, where Justice Antonin Scalia interrupted Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Do you think that change has to happen overnight? And do you think it’s-

ANTONIN SCALIA: Can I—can I hear what you were about to say? What are those numbers? I was really curious to hear those numbers.

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