Journalism Question Looms Large At Washington Post Over Years Of Failure In Not Reporting Justice Samuel Alito’s Upside-Down Flag Story

A news story erupted Saturday catching me off-guard and James too, as I shouted the lead paragraph to him while sitting in my office. Last week, many of us learned from The New York Times that an upside-down American flag had been temporarily raised over the Samuel Alito household in the days after January 6, 2021.  For those of us who come from homes where respect for the flag is almost hereditary and as adults, we follow the traditions of flag flying from our parents and grandparents, the news story was troubling.  Especially since the person at the heart of the story was a sitting justice on the United States Supreme Court. During the following days, the news about the flag was made into pointed, and correctly so, editorial cartoons blasting his lack of patriotism and making it clear that blaming one’s wife, as Alito did, was slimy.

Justice Sam Alito tried to claim in his awkward attempt at rationalization that the whole matter was simply a response to a dispute with neighbors.  How demeaning oneself and looking like a complete idiot across the entire nation ‘showed the neighbor’ is not something I have yet been able to compute.  But then I do not live in a conspiracy bubble of insanity. I was opposed to the insurrection by the angry white mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021.

With that as a backdrop comes the news report on Saturday that the Washington Post did not learn about the flag on May 16 from that Times report.  Rather the newsroom knew of the shameful Alito story since the day it happened. Like anyone who wishes to drop an embarrassment and have some cover, the Post dropped the news in the middle of this Memorial Day weekend.  More than a week after the Times’s report.

I want you to know that I feel compelled to set my own record in clear view and be upfront before continuing this article. For the record, this home has subscribed to the digital edition of the Washington Post since the campaign season in 2016. We feel it is important to support newspapers, (Wisconsin State Journal, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times) but also strongly feel that having updated news along with views and perspectives about this perilous time where autocrats and fascists are posing direct threats to our democracy. Being solid news consumers is something every citizen needs to undertake. Being informed of facts is essential in any age, but more so now than ever. I do not shy away from standing alongside sound journalistic standards or the straight talk required when those standards are not upheld. Just because I have a subscription to a newspaper and respect the overall product published each day does not mean I will be quiet when their newsroom fails to meet the required standards. Being a subscriber seems to make it incumbent that I speak out. Let me then be blunt. I am simply aghast that the Washington Post scuttled this story about Alito for years.

On Jan. 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration, which the Alitos did not attend — Barnes went to their home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence, demanding that he “get off my property.”

As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, “It’s an international signal of distress!”

Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.

Martha-Ann Alito then got out of the car and shouted in apparent reference to the neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it up the flagpole. “There! Is that better?” she yelled.

I cannot afford the Post any praise for reporting their account of the story this weekend. Yes, there was that first-hand account of confronting the Alito family at their home, and it underscores (again) the white and angry mentality that is so ripe among their kind. “Feel our pain’ from the resentment-prone and heavily weighted grievance crowd makes the rest of us want to vomit.  But so does the lean and half-hearted and surely hours-long struggle of how to explain the paper’s lack of reporting this story in a timely fashion. What resulted felt like an iron-deficient hospital patient needing another blood transfusion.

The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.

“At the time” they decided “not to report” the Alito story. But what about during the many months of court chaos that unfolded where the very fabric of objectivity had been torn asunder with bribes provided to Clarence Thomas for luxury travels and his wife was reported to be neck deep in far right-wing activism and outright lunacy? And of course, Alito himself was in the muck, too. I am sure he undertakes Catholic finger play before dinner but that does not give him license for what was at the heart of a New York Times story. They reported a conservative activist knew the ruling in 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby after donors of the right-winger had dinner with the justice.  Alito surely needed a confessional session by then, and yet in recalling that story during the past three years, the Post saw no need to report the flag events of 2021 to their readers. They could not see the long chain of events and draw any conclusions?

The integrity of the Supreme Court is a major story that plays out almost weekly with news articles and court cases that strike at the very heart of our conscience as a democracy. Yes, the Post sat on the flag story.  A story that showcases the weak foundation of a fragile white conservative male justice who willingly tossed his country and his wife off the flagpole at his home.

The Post had the PRIME moment to report the flag story when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision barring Trump from that state’s primary ballot.  The Court stated Colorado couldn’t make the decision, but also shockingly set forth additional rules for how Section 3 can be applied….and equally important not applied. But hear me now, the ruling was a bare five-justice majority that issued that harmful decision for our democracy. Oh….yes…let us not forget……Justice Alito provided that powerful essential fifth vote that cratered the Fourteenth Amendment’s bar to insurrectionists’ holding office.

The Washington Post has a great deal to explain.  Not only to loyal newspaper subscribers who rely on information but also to a nation that faces a severe test about the very foundations of this nation.