Stengel-gate Spreads: Why Was Richard Stengel Presented as an Expert on the Constitution on NPR?

by Aaron Worthing
To give a quick review, on June 23, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story* for Time Magazine rife with factual errors.  On June 29, I published a piece here recording fourteen clear factual errors in that story.  I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared at Time Magazine as its cover story, and ever since I have been crusading to embarrass them into a correction.
But what is also embarrassing is that other media outlets have treated Mr. Stengel as though he was an expert on the Constitution.  Consider, for example, this blurp for a show on NPR entitled “Talk of the Nation” that aired on July 4:
In the fierce debates over health care, Libya, debt, gay marriage and other issues, Americans have been getting a lecture on the meaning of the Constitution and the intentions of its authors. Andrea Seabrook speaks with Richard Stengel of Time magazine and Yale law professor Akhil Amar about the political divide over the Constitution and how an 18th-century document applies in a 21st-century world. [emphasis added]
Now, I may not like Professor Amar personally, and I may vehemently disagree with him on many points, but I think it is fair to consider him an expert on the Constitution.
But as the other “expert,” we have Richard Stengel.