ABC News declares SCOTUS ruling 'delivers a blow to election rights'

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Media top headlines July 6

New York Times getting hit by critics and lawmakers for suggesting U.S. flag is now 'alienating some,' NPR decrying the Declaration of Independence as a document with 'deeply ingrained hypocrisies,' and an NBC News historian fawning over Biden round out today's top media headlines

ABC News offered a very skewed framing of the recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld Arizona's efforts to ensure election integrity. 

In a 6-3 decision on Thursday, the court backed the state's new law which outlawed ballot harvesting, which criminalizes the submission of another person's completed ballot by a third party, other than a family member, caregiver, mail carrier or election official and the disqualification of provisional ballots that are cast in the wrong precinct.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA MELTS DOWN OVER SUPREME COURT DECISION ON ARIZONA ‘VOTING RESTRICTIONS’

However, on Sunday's Fourth of July installment of "This Week," ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz teased the subject during the show's introduction, telling viewers, "the Supreme Court delivers a blow to election rights."

During the panel discussion, ABC News' deputy political director Averi Harper echoed critics of various GOP-backed voting reform bills, calling it "voter restrictions" that are "discriminatory on the basis of race."

"The American people are not on the side of Republican lawmakers in some of these states, 2-1 if you look at the ABC-Washington Post poll," Harper told Raddatz, citing results that show higher favoritism towards "making lawful voting easier" than "making voter fraud harder."

SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS ARIZONA VOTER FRAUD PROTECTIONS

Los Angeles Times columnist LZ Granderson knocked the Supreme Court justices for being "privileged" after pointing out how they acknowledge that the voting reform bills "impact minorities."

"I grew up poor. I remember my mom scraping together 50 cents, 75 cents, a dollar just for gas money to get to the grocery store. When you do that to polling places, now you're forcing minorities to decide whether or not they're going to invest gas money to get to the polling places that are now further away or do I use this gas money to get to the grocery store or do I get to work," Granderson explained. "They're privileged saying that this doesn't inconvenience them enough- well how do you know? When was the last time you were that poor?"

Washington Post correspondent Mary Jordan appeared to agree, sharing her experience during a recent trip to Mississippi and how on the morning of the election, people would turn out and the "polling place would be closed" in Democrat-heavy areas. 

"There's all kinds of dirty tricks being played about closing polls, switching where you're supposed to be, telling people they're in the wrong place even if they're in the right place- I think that if people really knew what was going on because it differs state by state and county by county, they would think ‘It’s July 4th here, it's all about voting, right? It's the most fundamental of rights,'" Jordan said. "And It's kind of shocking that right now, a lot of people don’t have the same access to votes as other Americans."  

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Time Magazine correspondent Molly Ball stressed that the SCOTUS ruling was "rather limited" and had nothing to do with the closing of polling places, warned that the decision "has implications for so many other cases that are being brought."