For years, the mainstream media protested vigorously when they were referred to as left-leaning. Nowadays, not only are they are no longer in denial about their true colors, but they seem to take pride in their liberal bias.
This does not mean they have come to terms with who — or what — they are. Media outlets of the magnitude of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN having been caught out repeatedly peddling false narratives, and yet they cling tenaciously to the myth that they are honest brokers of the news. It’s almost as if they believe that by repeating a lie enough times, it eventually metamorphoses into the truth.
What otherwise compelled the Associated Press to post within the past hour a tweet advising that the Supreme Court narrowly ruled on behalf of a baker who objected to making a same-sex wedding cake based on his religious convictions. Narrowly. You assume reading that the decision was 5-4. On a 9-judge panel, any other ruling is hard to characterize as narrow.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Supreme Court rules narrowly for Colorado baker who wouldn't make same-sex wedding cake. https://t.co/ZSqp0u6qnA
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 4, 2018
If you link through to the article the tweet teases, however, you find that the decision was 7-2. All of the judges save two found the Colorado Civil Rights Commission guilty of anti-religious bias in its own ruling against Christian baker Jack Phillips whose First Amendment rights, the high court added, had been violated.
On what basis does the AP frame the court’s decision as “narrow”? Presumably, that’s laid out in the first paragraph, which also uses the adverb narrowly:
The Supreme Court ruled narrowly Monday for a Colorado baker who wouldn’t make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. But the court is not deciding the big issue in the case, whether a business can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gay and lesbian people.
So the fact that the court didn’t rule on the larger issue of the case makes their decision in this instance narrow? Maybe it’s time for the AP to add a chapter to its stylebook on how to write stories about news you wish weren’t true.
