Fox News Absurdly Equates Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Beyoncé Tickets With Clarence Thomas’ $4 Million In Gifts

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas found his name in headlines again this month when a watchdog group calculated he had raked in over $4 million in gifts during his career. Fox News chose to report this story by omitting the jaw-dropping number and instead highlighting the far lower cost of some Beyoncé tickets the singer herself gave to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The June 6 report by Fix The Court tallied the data from news reports and the justices’ latest financial disclosures to show how the $4,042,286 in gifts to Thomas far exceeded those given to other justices.

In fact, over the years Thomas has received more than the gifts given to all other justices combined.

The gifts to Thomas totaled more than 450 times the $8,960 in gifts received by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s newest member. She joined in 2022 decades after Thomas in 1991, but calculating the totals per year still results in Thomas getting an average of nearly $125,000 annually and Jackson less than $4,500.

For Fox News, however, Jackson’s gifts not only warranted a mention but an itemization, while the mentions of Thomas’ gifts mysteriously omitted the far more shocking numbers. Jackson’s situation was repeatedly reported in one breath with her colleague in what seems to be a deliberate attempt to draw an equivalence between the two. Fox’s reporting also skipped over a year of outcry regarding a bombshell April 2023 ProPublica report that shined a harsh spotlight on the lavish vacations Thomas and his wife Ginny Thomas had enjoyed, paid for by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, mostly describing Crow as simply Thomas’ “friend.”

A search of Fox News broadcasts on SnapStream dating from June 6 (the day the Fix The Court data was published) to today brings up three mentions of Thomas, none of which even hinted at the stunning sum of gifts he had received — but all mentioned Jackson and the Beyoncé tickets.

During the Friday, June 6 episode of America Reports, co-anchors Sandra Smith and John Roberts reported on the financial disclosures, setting the pattern their colleagues would follow in omitting the amount of the gifts to Thomas while emphasizing the gifts to Jackson.

“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is acknowledging previously unreported trips that were paid for by a conservative billionaire,” said Roberts. “Thomas has amended last year’s financial disclosure form to include the trips that were back in 2019. The vacations to Bali and California were not originally included in his 2019 disclosure form.”

“By the way, last year, Sandra, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justice, got four tickets from Beyoncé for a concert worth $3,700,” Roberts added.

“There you go!” replied Smith as they both chuckled.

On the Friday, June 6 episode of Special Report with Bret Baier, senior national correspondent Rich Edson was filling in for Bret Baier and framed the story as Thomas filing “amended” financial disclosure forms, ending by mentioning Jackson “was given concert tickets by Beyoncé,” emphasizing the singer’s name.

For the 2:00 am ET Saturday replay of the Friday, June 6 episode of Hannity, overnight anchor Chanley Painter read live on air a Fox News Update about Supreme Court justices “filing financial disclosure reports” that “show Justice Clarence Thomas took two luxury trips with a megadonor, [and] Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson received thousands of dollars worth of concert tickets and artwork.”

Fox News took a similar approach in the coverage on their website.

A June 7 article was headlined “Clarence Thomas formally reports 2019 trips paid by friend and GOP donor Harlan Crow” and had a subheading of “Thomas ‘sought and received guidance from his accountant and ethics counsel,’ filing states.” It does not include any figures whatsoever regarding the total gifts received by Thomas, the value of the most recent travel expenses provided by Crow, or any other monetary details.

Crow is identified as a “friend,” with no details about the millions of dollars he has donated over the years to Republican and conservative activist causes.

In contrast, a June 8 Fox News article on the gifts to Jackson was headlined “Beyoncé gave SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concert tickets valued at nearly $4,000: report” and described gifts to her as “eye-popping” despite being in the low four-figures.

The Jackson article not only spells out the value of the tickets and puts it in the headline, but also provides values for four other items: two pieces of artwork she was gifted to hang in her chambers, an advance for her upcoming memoir, clothes for a photo shoot, and a flower display given by Oprah Winfrey in recognition of her being the first Black woman on the Supreme Court — and notes that Vice President Kamala Harris got tickets from Beyoncé too, valued at $3,300.

A search of FoxNews.com does not bring up individual articles regarding gifts to any other current justices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh is mentioned briefly at the end of the Jackson article, for receiving a $340,000 advance for the legal memoir he is writing (which was then compared to the nearly $900,000 advance Jackson got for her book).

Fix The Court reacted to the Fox News coverage with a tweet that sarcastically asked, “$4,000 in gifts is the same as $4 million in gifts, right?”

Elected officials and candidates are required to file financial disclosure reports, both for their own personal finances and for their campaign contributions and expenditures, for good reason. Voters deserve to know how the people who wish to run our government at all levels make their money, see what potential avenues for influences of any kind exist, and have ready access to that information so it can be incorporated into their choices at the ballot box.

It was long overdue for the Supreme Court — whose members decide cases that determine the outcome of elections, have seismic impacts on our economy, and determine the definition of our core constitutional rights — to provide a higher level of transparency to the American public.

Because most people have neither the time nor energy to sort through public records data themselves, what details media outlets chose to report often radically affects how people perceive the story, creating distortions even if the facts themselves are not distorted, but are reported with an incomplete or misleading context, especially when there’s a pattern of such reporting.

As Ian Fleming wrote in his 1959 novel Goldfinger (adapted into the 1964 film of the same name starring Sean Connery as James Bond), “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

Here, a decision was made at Fox News at least five times — three on-air television reports plus the two articles on the network’s website cited above — to leave out the seven-figure total of the gifts to Thomas, leave out the broader controversy about Thomas’ gifts from Crow, repeatedly mention the four-figure cost of the concert tickets given to Jackson, and emphasize the celebrity aspect of the story.

“Justice Thomas filed an amended financial disclosure report” is, if reported without any additional details, a dry and quickly forgotten story. “Beyoncé gave Justice Jackson concert tickets” is more memorably titillating (plus the quick mentions of posh flower arrangements from Oprah and Beyoncé giving tickets to Kamala Harris too), especially when the cost of the tickets is beyond the budget of the average American watching at home.

The other cable news networks took a more comprehensive approach, devoting far longer segments to the topics than the barely 30-second Fox clips above, and focusing more on the much bigger dollar amounts flowing to Thomas.

As an example, the panel discussion on Friday’s episode of CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip dug in during an almost eleven-minute segment that covered the millions of dollars in gifts to Thomas and the ethical concerns over Crow’s influence.

This segment featured commentary by Elie Mystal saying he “would not make a false equivalency between Beyoncé tickets and taking vacations with rich billionaire donors,” but “if Beyoncé happened to have a case in front of the Supreme Court, I would expect, on the basis of this disclosure, Ketanji Brown Jackson to recuse herself. That would be the appropriate thing for Jackson to do, right?”

Searching CNN.com does find a cnn." target="_blank" rel="noopener">short video clip on Jackson’s Beyoncé tickets, but even that 1:19 long video mentions book deals paid to four justices: Jackson, Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Sonia Sotomayor. There is also a longer article treatment for Thomas’ amended disclosures regarding the travel paid by Crow.

Notably, the past few days of CNN coverage since June 6 include dozens of additional on-air references to Thomas and the gifts he received without ever mentioning Jackson.

A similar pattern occurs with MSNBC’s coverage, with a SnapStream search bringing up just three shows that referenced Jackson’s Beyoncé tickets in passing amidst over a hundred mentions of Thomas, with most of the network’s schedule devoting long segments to discussing the gifts to him.

A Supreme Court justice getting concert tickets from Queen Bey herself is an interesting tidbit that CNN and MSNBC covered too, and Fox News’ bias isn’t in reporting on that it happened, but in their choices regarding emphasis and context. Mentioning Jackson’s Beyoncé tickets with each report on Thomas, making it the final part of televised segments that barely last 30 seconds, and with Fox’s on-air personalities being more theatrical than how they drily reported about Thomas just seconds before — it all adds up to something a bit more than coincidence.

Watch the clips above via Fox News and CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.