June 28-29, 2010: Conservative Media Outlets Falsely Claim that Solicitor General Called Government Book-Banning ‘Fine’ in ‘Citizens United’ Arguments

The Web site of conservative pundit and activist Andrew Breitbart misquotes Solicitor General Elena Kagan to give the appearance that she condones book banning. The story comes from a video produced by Naked Emperor News and promoted by Breitbart TV, featuring edited audio recordings of Kagan’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision (see September 9, 2009 and January 21, 2010). [Media Matters, 6/29/2010] Breitbart TV headlines its story: “Kagan’s own words: It’s fine if the law bans books because government won’t really enforce it.” [Breitbart TV, 6/28/2010] The story is immediately picked up by the conservative Drudge Report, which uses a nearly identical headline and links to the Breitbart site. [Media Matters, 6/29/2010] The influential conservative blog Gateway Pundit posts the story, again with an almost-identical headline, and includes the comment, “Spoken like a true leftist radical…” [Jim Hoft, 6/28/2010] (Both Breitbart TV and Gateway Pundit will later delete their posts.) Fox Nation, the blog for Fox News, also posts the story with the headline: “Kagan: It’s Fine If the Law Bans Books.” [Fox Nation, 6/29/2010] However, the video and audio have been edited to have Kagan claiming something she never said. During her argument before the Court, she actually argued that federal law had never banned books and probably could not do so. She never uttered the words, “It’s fine if the law bans books.” She said that if the government did try to ban books under campaign finance laws, “there would be quite good as-applied challenge” to the law, meaning that if a corporation did publish a book that advocated for or against a candidate during an election season, it would have a strong case against any potential banning by the government. Kagan later said: “[W]hat we’re saying is that there has never been an enforcement action for books. Nobody has ever suggested—nobody in Congress, nobody in the administrative apparatus has ever suggested that books pose any kind of corruption problem, so I think that there would be a good as-applied challenge with respect to that.” [Media Matters, 6/29/2010] Naked Emperor News, which produced the video, is a small organization run by conservative activist Pam Key and promoted by the Breitbart Web network. [Media Matters, 9/2/2010]