A quick thread on honesty/dishonesty in reporting on birthright citizenship. Begin with the fine summary by @adamliptak of the legal debate over the 14th Amendment’s conferral of citizenship on a child born in the U.S. to a mother not in the country legally and whose father 1
is also either not present in the country legally or whose identity is unknown. The weight of scholarship is that the ratifiers of the Amendment intended that child to be a U.S. citizen, but there are fine scholars who disagree and it is indisputable that #SCOTUS has not ruled 2
on the question. Thus the online headline of the @adamliptak piece —“Birthright Citizenship Proposal Is At Odds With Legal Consensus”— is misleading if you understand consensus to be unanimity or near unanimity among scholars of the question. It simply isn’t true that there is 3
a “consensus.” There’s a super-majority view, and you might even say the “overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion believes the 14th Am confers birthright citizenship on the child of parents in the country illegally,” (not sure if I agree but it’s defensible). But “consensus” 4
misleads a headline reader and is actually contradicted by the story. This is where media has to be willing to take the time to be smart or be silent, to use the space to convey nuance or to contribute to the problem of a noisy, often untrusting public. Those who know the real 5
situation and believe in the minority review would in many cases resent the misrepresentation that could easily be avoided. If the Executive Order is signed, it should be fairly represented and debated, not dismissed. People can file an amicus brief; they can write op-eds or 6
post Twitter threads. But they ought not to misrepresent and then expect the public debate to be better for the misrepresentation. It never is. Here’s the @adamliptak link: nytimes.com/2018/10/30/us/… 7
