This is the blog put up by Goldstein & Howe, a major Supreme Court litigation boutique and the operator of SCOTUSblog. My question: How influential is the blog likely to be during the Supreme Court nomination season?
My conjecture: Very. I don’t know how many hits it will get, but I suspect that:
-
Most journalists who are covering the debates, and politicos involved in the debates, will check it routinely, and will be influenced to some extent by what is written there.
-
People who want to influence the debate will dearly love to get their points picked up by the G&H bloggers.
-
As with all editors and reporters, the bloggers will occasionally have opportunities to influence the process, for instance by deciding what to stress, what things to cover more than other things, what to investigate further, when to post certain things, and so on; it will be up to the G&H people to decide whether they want to use the opportunities, and how much.
Of course, this raises another point: What other Supreme Court Nomination Blogs will there be out there? And how will they persuade reporters and politicos to read them, as well as the G&H blog?
UPDATE: Jonathan Adler reminded me that NRO has Bench Memos, and also told me that there’s RedState.org’s ConfirmThem.com and the National Women’s Law Center’s NominationWatch.com. But my guess is that the influence of these blogs will be in some measure limited by their having positioned themselves as fairly partisan voices. They may still be influential because people on those sides can use them for talking points, and journalists who are interested in what one side is thinking could find them helpful. Still, I wonder whether there will be other blogs that aim at providing news and relatively balanced analysis, and thus try to get a broader range of journalist and politico readers, including ones who aren’t that interested in political advocacy as such.
Comments are closed.