This piece has been updated to reflect that Good Morning America has since updated its YouTube and Twitter accounts.
On Thursday, Ketanji Brown Jackson was officially sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. She had been confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April. In nominating Jackson, President Joe Biden was fulfilling a campaign promise to nominate the first black woman justice. It was thus particularly memorable, then, that during her confirmation hearings, Jackson claimed she could not define what a woman was.
Good Morning America, in commemorating the swearing in ceremony, engaged in some rather embarrassing revisionist history on its YouTube channel and over Twitter.
I guess Thurgood Marshall & Clarence Thomas ain’t black because they didn’t vote for Biden or something pic.twitter.com/c6gseK32AH
— Kangmin Lee ? (@kangminjlee) June 30, 2022
Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in as the first Black Supreme Court justice in U.S. history. https://t.co/QtHwS0SRCS pic.twitter.com/h5lCPFjWTb
— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 30, 2022
The factually incorrect YouTube video title and tweet remained up for several hours. In the case of Twitter, the tweet was deleted and a new one was posted at 6:45pm.
"corrected" after the original tweet was up for 5 hours pic.twitter.com/KGTfPb0vEy
— Jacob Bliss (@JacobMBliss) June 30, 2022
People were hardly satisfied, though, as there are over 1,200 replies mocking the account for the error.
Justice Jackson is, of course, not the first black Supreme Court justice. That title goes to Justice Thurgood Marshall, who served from 1967 until 1991. He was replaced by the second black justice, Clarence Thomas, who still serves on the Court.
The Facebook account for Good Morning America correctly notes that Justice Jackson is the first black woman to sit on the Court.
The Good Morning America website also correctly notes as much, though Justice Marshall is mentioned for his criminal defense experience, which Jackson also has, and not because he was the first black person to serve on the Court. Justice Thomas is not mentioned at all.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also engaged in a factual error about the makeup of the Court in February, when he claimed from the Senate floor that the Supreme Court was made up of "all white men" until 1981, at which point Justice Marshall had already been on the Court for 14 years. Unlike Good Morning America, though, Schumer quickly realized his mistake and issued a correction over Twitter a short time later, apologizing and claiming he "misspoke."
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