A sometimes subtle but unmistakable pattern has emerged in major news organizations’ coverage of Judge Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination.

Through various mixes of factual distortions, tendentious wording, and uncritical parroting of misleading attacks by liberal critics, some reporters insinuate that Alito is a slippery character who will say whatever senators want to hear, especially by "distancing himself" from past statements that (these reporters imply) show him to be a conservative ideologue.

I focus here not on the consistently mindless liberal hysteria of The New York Times’ editorial page. Nor on such egregious factual errors as the assertion on C-SPAN, by Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder Newspapers, that in a study of Alito’s more than 300 judicial opinions, "we didn’t find a single case in which Judge Alito sided with African-Americans … [who were] alleging racial bias." This, Henderson added, is "rather remarkable."

What is remarkable is that any reporter could have overlooked the at least seven cases in which Alito has sided with African-Americans alleging racial bias. Also remarkable is the illiterate statistical analysis and loaded language used by Henderson and Howard Mintz in a 2,652-word article published (in whole or in part) by some 18 newspapers. It makes the misleading claim that in 15 years as a judge, Alito has sought "to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation’s laws," including "a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires" for proving job discrimination.

The systematic slanting – conscious or unconscious – of this and other news reports has helped fuel a disingenuous campaign by liberal groups and senators to caricature Alito as a conservative ideologue.