Julia Longoria: I’m Julia Longoria. This is More Perfect. Today, We’re going to spotlight some Supreme Court reporting from a different corner of WNYC Studios.

Julia Longoria: So, can you go ahead and just introduce yourself?

Micah Loewinger: Yes. My name is Micah Loewinger, and I am a reporter with On the Media from WNYC.

Julia Longoria: Micah reports on online communities. And he kinda backed into a Supreme Court story accidentally. It began while he was reporting on, of all things, hurricanes.

Micah Loewinger: So, I had learned about volunteer storm relief. 

Julia Longoria: Volunteers would try and help each other out during a storm using an app.

Micah Loewinger: Walkie-talkie app called Zello. You could go on Zello when a hurricane was approaching the United States and you could hear people at first just kind of tracking like armchair-meteorologist style. Like what do we know about this storm? When's it gonna make landfall? And then once the storm was raging, these walkie-talkie groups would actually do something really beautiful, and they would go out and they would save people from their flooded homes.

Julia Longoria: You could hear all of this unfold in real time, in audio, on Zello. Micah started poking around the app and realized it was used by a lot of groups, not just do-gooders during hurricanes. 

Micah Loewinger: I started to see that a lot of the people who are most active had these very strange, uh, far right insignias and usernames. And this is when I started to realize like, oh, these are far right anti-government militia groups. 

Julia Longoria: That's how Micah found himself listening in on a far right group on Zello on January 6, 2021. He witnessed something kind of remarkable. 

[Archive, Male Recording]: To all the boots on the ground in DC, we are praying stoutly for you that you will get to accomplish what God has put you there for. 

Micah Loewinger: I ended up capturing a recording of an oath keeper breaking into the capitol that seemed to offer some evidence that some part of the violence that took place on January 6th was premeditated. That there was a plan.

[Archive, Jess Recording]: Godspeed and fair winds to us.

[Archive, Male Recording]: Amen sister. Stay safe.

Micah Loewinger: I was hearing this like, mysterious woman, in this group.

[Archive, Jess Recording]: We got a good group. We got like 30-40 of us. We’re sticking together and sticking to the plan. 

Micah Loewinger: She starts talking about the Capitol. She's moving towards the Capitol. 

[Archive, Jess Recording]: We are in the mezzanine. We are in the main dome right now. We are rocking it.

Micah Loewinger: And then eventually she's inside the rotunda and she's shouting like over like the cacophony of police, and rioters inside the rotunda. And she says like

[Archive, Jess Recording]: They’re shooting people with paintballs but we're in here. 

Micah Loewinger: We’re in here.

[Archive, Male Recording]: Get it Jess! Do your shit!

Micah Loewinger: It hit me like, I am listening to somebody narrating themselves breaking into the Capitol. 

Julia Longoria: Micah reported on this. He did a piece on WNYC's On the Media, he co-wrote an article in the Guardian, and he was invited onto 60 Minutes. And then, he got an email from the U.S. government.

Micah Loewinger: The government wanted to use that recording as evidence, and I, because I was the one who made the recording, was the only one who could take the stand and verify its authenticity.

Julia Longoria: They wanted him to testify in court as part of the prosecution against the rioters.

Micah Loewinger: Being put in this position as a journalist made me quite uncomfortable because I was concerned that it would hurt my credibility as a journalist.

Julia Longoria: Testifying as a journalist to help put somebody in jail felt to Micah like a big violation of something fundamental.

Micah Loewinger: Even though I never spoke to this woman, the oath keeper we hear in the recording, I was concerned if you Googled me, all you'd see was Micah Loewinger, federal trial. And it would just look like I was a Fed. I write about the far right and that entails earning the trust of people who are in these kinds of groups and I am able to uh, earn trust with these sources because I can show them like I can keep a secret. If you wanna leak me something, but you don't want people in your group to know that you were the one who gave me the information. No one will ever know. And that is like a kind of a agreement built on trust.

Julia Longoria: It felt like this was violating not only the trust between him and his sources. But trust in journalism by audiences in a democratic society. 

Micah Loewinger: I don't think we should play buddy, buddy, you know, with the Feds.

[Music]

Micah Loewinger: I knew a subpoena was coming. I knew there was likely nothing I was gonna be able to do to get out of it. And I was kind of trying to come to terms with what was about to become kind of like the biggest and weirdest thing to happen to me in my life.

Julia Longoria: Micah felt like he didn’t have a choice. He agreed to testify. But he wondered, 

Micah Loewinger: What have other journalists done historically in this situation?

Julia Longoria: And as with most big questions about the fate of a functioning democracy, it turns out, there's a Supreme Court case for that. 

Micah Loewinger: I ended up learning about Branzburg v. Hayes, and this remarkable journalist named Earl Caldwell, who was kind of at the center of it. 

[OYEZ THEME: Oyez. Oyez.]

Julia Longoria: Today on More Perfect, the story of journalist Earl Caldwell, courtesy of Micah Loewinger and WNYC’s On the Media. Caldwell posed questions to the highest court in our country about what our first amendment right to freedom of the press really means in a functioning democracy.

[OYEZ THEME: Oyez. Oyez. Admonish to draw near and give their attention for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this honorable Court.]

Julia Longoria: I'm Julia Longoria. This is More Perfect. Today, the story of a journalist named Earl Caldwell. He got a call from the U.S. government, and ultimately found himself at the center of a Supreme Court case. Micah Loewinger first reported the story for the podcast and radio show, On the Media. It was inspired, in part, by Micah getting his own call from the government. A quick note, the clips you'll hear of Earl are courtesy of an oral history project done by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Here's Micah.

Micah Loewinger: The story begins when Earl Caldwell, then a reporter in his early 30s, joined the New York Times.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: There was only one other Black reporter on the staff when I got there, and what was approaching was the summer of '67, which was to be like no other summer in the history of the republic.

[Archive, Male Newscaster]: The worst race riots since those two years ago in the Watts section of Los Angeles, rock New Jersey's largest city, Newark for five consecutive days and nights.

[Archive, Male Newscaster] : Law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan. Pillage, looting, murder, and arson have nothing to do with Civil Rights.

Micah Loewinger: The paper flew Earl all around the country to cover the riots and the Civil Rights Movement, and in April 1968, the Times sent him down to Memphis, Tennessee to interview Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Earl checked in at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was also staying.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: And Dr. King gave me an interview. While we're standing on that balcony talking, he, he begins to ask me about my personal life, how I got into the newspaper, what it was like being a reporter at the New York Times. He's said, "We'll talk again tomorrow because we don't have a chance to go through everything.” And uh, nobody told me there was going to be a big rally that night, which turned out to be a very historical moment and that's where King made his Mountaintop speech.

[Archive, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr]: We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop. [crowd cheers]

Micah Loewinger: Earl only learned about this speech later because he was back at the motel.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: And it was this fierce storm like it was lightning and thunder, the shutters were rattling and everything.

[Archive, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr]: And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know the night that we as people will get to the promised land.

Micah Loewinger: The next morning, Earl heard about the morbid premonitions in King's speech, and the way Earl describes this day sounds like a bad dream. You know, that kind of dread when you're rushing somewhere, but you feel like you're treading water.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: I'm trying to get to King right away and I can't get to him, and the day is getting away from us, and I was missing my deadline.

Micah Loewinger: I imagine him pacing around his motel room, chain-smoking cigarettes, trying to figure out what to do when he heard a loud noise outside.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: I heard what I thought was a bomb blast, and I run out there in my shorts. What happened? What happened? And then I ran up to the balcony, and I saw Dr. King. Could see those horrible wounds, huge, bigger than your fist in his jaw and neck.

[Archive, Male Newscaster]: Dr. King was standing on the balcony of a second-floor hotel room tonight when according to a companion, a shot was fired from across the street. In the friend's words, "The bullet exploded in his face."

Micah Loewinger: You can see Earl in some of the earliest photos of the assassination, in the scrum, hovering over MLK on the balcony. He was the only reporter on the scene and the first to break the story.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: So that was indeed the biggest story I ever had.

Julia Longoria: But the story that Earl Caldwell is probably best known for is his own. It started with an assignment.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: The New York Times sent me out to California to look into this group, uh, that had been rising in California and was coming to some national prominence called the Black Panther Party.

Micah Loewinger: Within a matter of months, Earl had developed deep access within the group.

Lee Levine: So it wasn't easy, even for a Black reporter like Earl to gain the trust of the Panthers.

Micah Loewinger: Lee Levine is a media law expert. He's writing a book about Earl Caldwell.

Lee Levine: The way he did it was providing what the Panthers considered to be fair coverage. You know, he was not misrepresenting who they were and what they were doing.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: I got so on the inside that I saw the Panthers moving a large cash of weapons from San Francisco to Oakland, where Huey Newton, the leader in the Panthers, was on trial for murder of a police officer.

[Archive, Females singing: Free Huey! Set our warrior free! Free Huey!]

[Archive, Male Newscaster]: 3000 Black Panthers turned out for the start of the trial. Spokesman say that if Newton is found guilty and given the death penalty, the sentence will have to be carried out over their dead bodies.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: I put the story in the paper, and when that story came out, the FBI came to the New York Times and demanded that I give them additional information about these weapons and how I knew it, where they were, all this stuff. And uh, I said, "What I know about this, I put it in the paper and everything." "Well, look, you're there all the time. We want an inside report. We want you to tell us everything that you're getting, everything you know it." Ooh, I said, "Not only could I not do it, I can't even have this conversation with you." They began to call every day.

Lee Levine: We now know that in fact, the FBI had informants among reporters who they could plant stories with. There are multiple examples of what is called COINTELPRO, which is its counterintelligence program directed at a variety of what the FBI deemed to be subversive groups, which included the Panthers.

Micah Loewinger: Forty years later, Earl was shocked to learn that his friend Ernest Withers, a prominent civil rights photojournalist, had been an informant much of his career.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: So finally one day they called Mrs. Brackett. They said, "You tell Earl Caldwell we're not playing games with him," and they got a subpoena for me to be the star witness against the Black Panthers before a federal grand jury.

Lee Levine: He had two strains running through his head. One was, as a journalist, I'm not going to be a snitch for the FBI. And then not inconsistent with that, as a Black person, I am not going to let the FBI use me to advance their goals against other Black people.

Micah Loewinger: To make matters worse, the government also wanted his reporting materials, including the unpublished stuff.

Lee Levine: Earl had a boatload of documents and tapes, a lot of recorded interviews with the Panthers, and they were all in a storage room at the Times Bureau.

Micah Loewinger: Earl discussed his archive with a lawyer at a fancy San Francisco law firm that the Times had hired to deal with the subpoena.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: And the guy says to me, "Look, we have a tremendous problem with law and order out here."

Lee Levine: And went on, according to Earl, to talk about the problem with Black militant violence, [laughs] When the guy told him to bring in his notes and stuff, so that he could go through them and told Earl that "I think there's probably stuff that you have that the government's entitled to." [laughs] And that totally freaked Earl out.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: I'm sitting there thinking like, you're in an awful situation because you're at the top of your career and all of a sudden, they're saying something that could get you killed. It wasn't then somebody would say, "Go shoot Caldwell." It was in this environment, somebody would say, "If he came out here and told us he is a reporter and got all this access and he's a spy for the FBI now, he shouldn't live."

Micah Loewinger: Earl learned that the Feds were going to come to the San Francisco Bureau to serve the subpoena.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: So we didn't know what to do and had all these documents. We just said, "We'll destroy it." Let's just, let’s just shred everything. Let's dig these tapes apart, cut them up and everything. Ooh, we had two of these real high garbage cans. We filled them up.

Micah Loewinger: And ultimately he decided to fight the subpoena in court. Because of his frustrations with the paper's legal team, Earl hired Anthony Amsterdam, a white lawyer recommended by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Amsterdam was confident that Earl could beat the subpoena. Lee Levine.

Lee Levine: My feeling is that in reality, the reason the subpoena was issued was because Earl, among a few other reporters, was giving a view of the Panthers that was contrary to the government, and specifically the FBI's preferred narrative to drive a wedge between Earl and the Panthers. They didn't need documents; they just needed to call him before a grand jury and have him testify behind closed doors, which is what happens in a grand jury.

Micah Loewinger: The Panthers wouldn't know what he said or if he said anything.

Lee Levine: Correct. Even if all he did in the grand jury room was assert his privilege not to answer substantive questions. I think the Panthers justifiably given what the FBI was up to, would have been nervous and would have cut off access to him.

Micah Loewinger: And actually this became a big part of Anthony Amsterdam's defense for Earl. They rooted this idea of reporters' privilege in the First Amendment.

Lee Levine: Everybody understands that the First Amendment prohibits the government from preventing publication in advance. That's called the Prior Restraint. That's the Pentagon Papers. Everybody also understands that the government can't penalize you after the fact for publishing information that relates to a matter of public concern, especially if it's true. What Earl was arguing is something different, but I think equally important, which is that even actions that government takes that don't directly prohibit or penalize the dissemination of information can have the effect in operation of depriving the public of important information about matters of public concern, and that that has an impact on the free flow of information that is analogous to a law that penalizes a reporter for publishing information after the fact.

Micah Loewinger: This is essentially what I was concerned about when I got my subpoena. If people come to suspect that all reporters are just secretly working on behalf of the government, this social contract propping up journalism pretty much just falls apart.

Lee Levine: Do you want me to go on and talk about what happened next?

Micah Loewinger: What happened next was that the court was sympathetic to the argument, but still ruled that Earl should go before a grand jury to authenticate his reporting. The Times thought this was a fair ruling, and Earl was happy to say that what he'd written was true, just not behind closed doors.

Lee Levine: So Earl decided to appeal and the Times, I think it's fair to say, was not happy about that.

Micah Loewinger: Earl wanted to talk about appealing the decision, so he went to speak with the top in-house New York Times lawyer, chief counsel, James Goodell.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: Goodell is shaking his finger in my face saying, "You keep pushing this and what's going to happen is you're going to get some bad law written and reporters will be suffering for a lot of years under this." Then I said, "I'm not pushing anything, it's the Justice Department that's pushing it," but he tried to put it on me.

Micah Loewinger: This conversation turned out to be prescient. At first, everything seemed to be going well for Earl and his legal team.

Lee Levine: Lo and behold, the Court of Appeals agreed with Earl and ruled that he didn't even have to appear before the grand jury.

Micah Loewinger: And this was a unanimous decision, right?

Lee Levine: Yes. Unanimous decision.

Micah Loewinger: So the government appeals?

Lee Levine: Yes, the government seeks review in the Supreme Court, and at the same time, there are these other cases lending their way through the courts.

Micah Loewinger: Paul Pappas.

Lee Levine: Television reporter in Massachusetts.

Micah Loewinger: Had also tried to fight a subpoena related to his reporting on the Black Panthers. Then there was Paul Branzburg, a reporter in Kentucky who refused to appear before a grand jury to discuss two sources he had witnessed making marijuana products.

Lee Levine: And all three of those cases were ultimately taken to the Supreme Court for review.

[Music]

Julia Longoria: These three press freedom cases come be known as Branzburg v. Hayes, but before the Supreme Court hears the case, something very dramatic happens that changes both the Court and the freedom of the press in our country forever. That's after the break.

Julia Longoria: I'm Julia Longoria, and from WNYC Studios, this is More Perfect. In 1971, as Earl Caldwell is preparing to appear at the Supreme Court, the Court has a solid block of relatively liberal justices and Earl likes his chances. But then, within one week

[Archive, Male Newscaster]: The White House announced this evening that Justice Hugo L. Black, the oldest member of the Supreme Court, has retired from the bench.

[Archive, Male Newscaster]: Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, turned in his resignation today, just six days after the resignation of Justice Hugo Black.

Julia Longoria: Nixon is president, and so the entire balance of the Court shifts, which is where we pick up with Micah Loewinger's story.

[Archive, Male Speaker]: The US Supreme Court today took on the kind of conservative weight sought so long by Mr. Nixon. It did so by reaching its full complement of nine members, with a swearing in of Justices Lewis Pollard Jr. and William Rehnquist.

Lee Levine: Justice Rehnquist came to the Court from the Justice Department, and while in the Justice Department, one of his jobs, as head of the Office of Legal Council, was to formulate the administration's position with respect to this very issue. [laughs] And so,

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: Everybody just assumed he would recuse himself, and he didn’t. He was sitting right there.

Micah Loewinger: Why didn't he recuse himself?

Lee Levine: Uh, I don't know. [laughs] Uh, I suppose he wanted to rule on the case and didn't think he had a conflict. Just like today, with uproars over Justice Thomas ruling on cases that some people think he shouldn't. There's really nothing that can be done about it.

Micah Loewinger: On June 29, 1972, the Court voted 5-4 against the reporters with Justice Rehnquist casting one of the deciding votes.

Lee Levine: Justice White, who wrote for the majority, wrote that this whole concept of indirect restraints was bogus. Then Justice Powell, newly on the court, wrote an opinion concurring in Justice White's opinion, but adding a few words of his own. His opinion has been characterized over the years as enigmatic because it seems to suggest, although not entirely clearly, that there are circumstances in which, on a case-by-case basis, a reporter would be able to successfully refuse to answer questions posed by a grand jury.

Micah Loewinger: This enigmatic opinion by Justice Powell would turn out to have a long afterlife, which we'll get to in a minute.

Lee Levine: After the Supreme Court's decision, Earl never heard another word from the government. So, he was never called to testify. There's an argument that the government accomplished what it wanted to accomplish, which is that it had established a precedent that would make sources in the future reluctant to talk to journalists.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: The Supreme Court said, yes, the government can force you to be a spy and that if you resist, you'll go to jail.

Micah Loewinger: Here's Earl speaking with CBS in 1973.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: I honestly don't believe that it's possible to do effective journalism in America now.

Lee Levine: Well, let me say this, in the immediate aftermath of the decision, they were, you know, the kinds of editorials you would expect in newspapers all over the country.

Micah Loewinger: Yeah, there was like a kind of a freak out.

Lee Levine: Yeah.

[Archive, Male Newscaster]: Editors at The New York Times are worried about the effects of the Supreme Court's decision. National editor, Jean Roberts, says his staff reporters are already jittering.

Micah Loewinger: After the trial, Earl testified before Congress advocating for a federal shield law.

[Archive, Earl Caldwell]: Only when we can operate in an atmosphere free of the intimidation of government, can we assure the public that we are vigorously investigating all phases of corruption and political 

Micah Loewinger: And lawmakers from both parties were listening. They discussed two kinds of bills, laws that would provide absolute immunity, no revealing of anonymous sources, no testifying before grand juries, period, or a qualified immunity, which would only require outing sources if three criteria are met.

[Archive, C. Whalen Jr]: One would be that the information sought from the reporter is relevant to an alleged crime. Second, that there's an overriding national interest involved, and third, and this is really the kicker in it, that it can be obtained that information from the reporter and no other source.

Micah Loewinger: The issue is that news outlets were split on the question of qualified versus absolute immunity. They just couldn't agree. And as a result, the federal shield law died on the vine.

Lee Levine: The one constructive thing that came out of it was that Jim Goodell

Micah Loewinger: The New York Times General Counsel, who allegedly wagged his finger at Earl

Lee Levine: To his great and everlasting credit, decided that he should take Justice Powell's admittedly enigmatic language and pour meaning into it. And over the next several decades, Jim kind of, took the lead and was instrumental in having virtually every federal Court of Appeals and virtually every state Supreme Court hold that, in fact, there is the kind of qualified First Amendment-based reporter's privilege, and that it operates in every kind of legal proceeding with the one exception of grand juries.

Micah Loewinger: In other words, Goodell, and his fellow media lawyers successfully pointed to the Caldwell Branzburg ruling to shield reporters from the judicial system. Despite this, several writers over the years have been forced to choose prison over revealing sources to a grand jury.

[Archive, Male Speaker]: Judith Miller was jailed for 85 days.

[Archive, Male Speaker]: Vanessa Leggett was jailed for refusing to give up her materials to the government.

[Archive, Male Speaker]: Josh Wolf, longest jail journalist for protecting a source in U.S. history.

Micah Loewinger: Towards the end of my conversation with Lee Levine, he told me he was pretty sure I could have gotten out of participating in the January 6th case. That I could have fought the subpoena in court and won, which honestly came as a shock, and I think he could tell.

Lee Levine: Let me say this, it will make you feel better. [laughs] Just a few years before this, during the first phase of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, where reporters were witnessing the klan engaging in violence and doing all other sorts of despicable things, many reporters were more than happy to share what they knew and saw and heard with the FBI. Nobody thought anything about it.

Micah Loewinger: This past October, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a new written policy at the DOJ. That the department would limit the circumstances in which prosecutors can subpoena journalists for their reporting materials. Of course, a policy unlike a law, can be easily undone by the next administration or the next. Congress needs to pass a federal shield law, like the Protect Reporters from Excessive State Suppression, aka the PRESS Act, which Representative Jamie Raskin discussed on the House floor last September.

[Archive, Jamie Raskin]: I'm very hopeful that this is the Congress in which we can get it done.

Micah Loewinger: It wasn't. The House bill passed, but the Senate bill never left the Judiciary Committee. Representative Raskin told me he intends to reintroduce the PRESS Act this summer. This is a basic protection for journalism. We should have codified it 50 years ago, and we need to pass it now.

[Music]

Julia Longoria: The whole time Micah was digging into Earl Caldwell’s story, he was thinking about his own situation. There are key differences between their stories. Micah wasn't being asked to testify against his sources. The Department of Justice just wanted him to verify his January 6th recordings in court. Micah ultimately did testify, but he felt complicated about it.

Micah Loewinger: Well, there's a few ways you can approach it. One, you could just be like the government wants to use my reporting to hold a violent and extremist group accountable for the crimes that they committed on January 6th. And there are certainly people who I spoke to who I think considered that to be my civil duty and also a great honor. There are also people, other journalists I spoke to, who don't feel so strongly about this idea that you should never collaborate with law enforcement. But for me, I felt like I had done my job, like my job was to uncover the truth. 

Julia Longoria: Yeah.

Micah Loewinger: I did not feel that my job was to uncover a piece of information, and then be the courier of that information through the criminal justice system right up to the point where somebody gets a sentence and they go to prison.

Julia Longoria: Was there an outcome in the case?

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Um, Jessica Watkins, who's the woman whose voice we hear in the recordings that I made, was sentenced to eight and a half years. And, uh, Stewart Rhodes, who was the higher profile defendant in the case that I testified in, was sentenced to 18 years of prison.

Julia Longoria: Wow.

Micah Loewinger: I felt a combination of pride that my journalism had made a difference, like this was the culmination of all of it, whether I wanted to admit it or not. And then on the other hand, I felt very confused like whether justice is truly being served, whether we can expect people to be rehabilitated. I just, you know, I was just kind of in that stew of, you know, not knowing.

Julia Longoria: Huh, the stew of not knowing. 

Micah Loewinger: It’s h…

Julia Longoria: It's really where we all live now.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Yeah. Indeed.

[Music] 

Micah Loewinger: What I see at the heart of this is just like trust, which is this very squishy thing and like what I think, Caldwell's case was getting at and I think what my anxiety and ambivalence about participating in the trial was about, was the vulnerability of trust. Trust between me and the people I would love to speak to in the future who can help me do the best possible journalism I can do, and the trust between us journalists and our audience. And we have to preserve that trust at all costs. And I know it's in short supply. I know that like the trust in the media is at an all time low, and that's a problem. But I just think it's a very fragile thing and, we as journalists can get people to trust us, sources and readers and listeners and viewers, by acting with integrity and transparency and writing about things that matter to people. And, uh, yeah, I don't know, being a mensch, you know, however you interpret that.

Julia Longoria: Yeah. 

[Music]

Julia Longoria: Micah Loewinger is a correspondent for On the Media. The piece we played today is part of an hour-long episode that goes deep into Micah’s reporting on January 6th. It’s called “Seditious Conspiracy,” and we’ve got a link to it in our show notes. While you’re at it, go ahead and subscribe to On the Media. It’s a super smart, rigorously reported show, and a great listen. Okay, roll the credits.

Whitney Jones: More Perfect is a production of WNYC Studios.

This episode was produced by me, Whitney Jones, and Julia Longoria, with help from Jenny Lawton. It was fact-checked by Sophie Hurwitz.

Special thanks to Tara Grove and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

The More Perfect team also includes Emily Siner, Emily Botein, Alyssa Edes, Gabrielle Berbey, Salman Ahad Khan, Emily Madray, David Herman and Joe Plourde. 

Our theme is by Alex Overington, and episode art is by Candice Evers. 

If you want more stories about the Supreme Court, we have plenty of old episodes for you to enjoy.  Subscribe to More Perfect and scroll back for more than two dozen episodes.  

Supreme Court audio is from Oyez, a free law project by Justia, and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Support for More Perfect is provided in part by The Smart Family Fund, and by listeners like you.

Thank you for listening and for supporting.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

‌Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.