For The Post, a Supreme black eye

The Post, however, declined to proceed with the story, which had come to the newspaper through its anonymous tip line.

Thus far, The Post has put forth this explanation, as reflected in its May 25 story about Barnes’s visit to Alexandria:

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.

It’s pretty clear now. As noted in Kantor’s reporting, Emily Baden, an actor and restaurant server, moved in with her mother in 2020 along with her boyfriend (now husband) down the street from the Alitos. After Joe Biden was declared winner of the November 2020 election, the couple displayed a sign that used Trump’s name alongside an expletive and another saying, “BYE DON.” Another pair of signs — “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit” — went up after the Jan. 6 riots. The signs helped to ignite some unpleasant verbal encounters between Martha-Ann Alito and Baden. In a statement, Justice Alito claims, “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Barnes told me: “We determined that it wasn’t the justice that flew the flag upside down and we determined it wasn’t a protest about the election or something else on the part of Mrs. Alito.” Asked how they had reached those determinations, Barnes said they were based on the claims of the Alitos, Martha-Ann Alito’s “actions when I saw her and what others in the neighborhood had told me.”

Pause right there. Barnes is addressing the considerations that he was processing at the time — essentially a haze of information during one of the most news-packed periods in American history. Reaching judgments in the moment, with imperfect information, is always harder than it is for a media critic gazing back with more than three years of context.

The upside-down flag, for example: This particular symbol originated as a signal of distress on the high seas and these days serves as a signal of figurative distress by political actors, including by opponents of President Barack Obama in the tea party movement. As the Times noted, the flipped flag is fashionable among Trump supporters who believe in the lie of a stolen 2020 presidential election, and it popped up at the Jan. 6 riots. But at the time that Barnes showed up at the Alitos’ house, just how common was the knowledge that the inverted flag was a symbol of election denial? Both CNN and the The Post published inventories of flags and symbols used by the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, neither of which featured the upside-down flag. According to Barnes, the tipster didn’t make this connection, noting only that there was an upside-down flag outside the Alitos’ home.

“I was not aware that an upside-down flag was a symbol of ‘Stop the Steal,” recalls Barnes. “It never came up in our conversations that this was a symbol of ‘Stop the Steal.’”

Twitter postings from the period in question, indeed, suggest that people were flipping their flags to communicate a general feeling of disgust and disapproval, though such thoughts among Trump supporters tend to mingle with the idea that Biden isn’t a legitimate president. There were at least a couple of posts from folks who had used the symbol to convey distress over the leadership of Trump.

Those caveats, though noteworthy, don’t rule out a harsh judgment of The Post’s inaction. Consider what Martha-Ann Alito told Barnes in their driveway encounter: “It’s an international signal of distress!” Just what sort of distress were the Alitos experiencing on a Fairfax County cul-de-sac? The quote was a clear indication that something newsworthy was happening in the Alitos’ residential life. As for The Post’s claim that it wasn’t clear in January 2021 “that the argument was rooted in politics,” well, that seems a bit naive. What argument involving a Supreme Court justice in January 2021 was not rooted in politics? If not politics, what was dividing these neighbors — Fairfax County’s protocols for the collection of bulk trash items?

The Alitos received deference to which they were not entitled. Though Justice Alito’s claim that the upside-down flag was flown “in response” to yard signs might be genuine, it’s a stretch. For one, Baden told me in an interview that she never even saw this alleged “response.” Plus — inverting the flag commonly expresses concerns more global than some handmade, glitter-sprayed, cursive sign down the street. “My involvement begins and ends with putting a sign in my yard that says, ‘F--- Trump’ that they used as a scapegoat” for their display. “I just want to say that’s absolutely ridiculous and everybody knows it,” said Baden.

No one from The Post contacted Baden, she says, until after the Times’s May 16 story was published. All signs point to a failure of The Post to publish something about this fracas, whatever its focus or takeaway.

In comments to Semafor, Cameron Barr, who served at the time as a managing editor at The Post, said the decision was a matter of “consensus” and that he now wishes he had pushed harder to publish it. Also: At the time, he suggested a story on the neighborhood dispute, a directive that in all likelihood would have involved the paper’s Metro section. I can find no evidence, however, that Metro was ever consulted on the matter. When I asked Martin Baron, who served as executive editor at the time, about how things proceeded, he responded, “I don’t know how things proceeded. I never knew about any of those discussions. I only learned about them when The Post inquired about the story. ...Had never heard of it.”

In his book “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” Baron says he was left out of the loop on key reporting about alleged Trump-Russia collusion. Was this another such instance? “I’m not weighing in on this,” responded Baron via email. A Post spokesperson said, “we can’t speak to the decisions made at that time other than what has been shared.”

Barnes started working as The Post’s Supreme Court reporter in 2006, joining a group of D.C. journalists — holders of the court’s “hard passes” — who have been criticized as institutionalists prone to cozying up with the ultra-powerful people they cover. In 2007, for instance, David Margolick wrote in the New York Times, “No other reporters are as passive as Supreme Court reporters.” Yet Barnes broke free of the tyrannical high court docket to do accountability stories, including one on Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and on Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

In recent years, major news outlets have bolstered their Supreme Court offerings by throwing more investigative muscle at the beat. Last month,, ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series that punctured the “thick wall of secrecy surrounding the Supreme Court to reveal how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel, pushing the Court to adopt its first code of conduct,” in the words of the Pulitzer judges.

Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, says that the Supreme Court’s emergence as “the most powerful and least accountable part of our government” is a recent development. The string of inside-the-court scoops in recent years by ProPublica, the Times and The Post has trained news consumers to expect ever-more probing coverage of the institution.

Against that backdrop, the Times’s flag scoop — and The Post’s breakdown — became a big story. The episode has left The Post in the position of having to play second fiddle on a story that it should have owned from the start. When I asked Barnes whether he had any regrets, he responded, “I’m not going to get into it.”