SCOTUS Media
July 10, 2020 ⚠️ Caution: Rant Ahead ⚠️
Hey peeps. We really need to talk about how the media covers the Supreme Court.
As I mentioned a couple days ago, the Court recently decided a major case about access to free contraceptive care. Although this was frequently referred to as “the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate,” I pointed out that the so-called mandate wasn’t actually *in* the text of the Affordable Care Act at all. Instead, after the ACA was passed, the contraceptive mandate was created by an administrative agency which, at the time, was under the policy control of President Obama.
Now let's see how the news media has described the mandate. Below are actual quotes from several popular news sources:
NYTimes: “the A.C.A.’s birth-control mandate”
Boston Globe: “no-cost birth control required by the Obama-era healthcare law”
Washington Post: “the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate”
Fox News: “the ACA’s contraceptive mandate”
NPR (Nina Totenberg): “the Affordable Care Act requirement that insurers provide free birth control coverage”
AP: “the Affordable Care Act’s Contraceptive Mandate”
Dalia Lithwick: “the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act”
Linda Greenhouse: “the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act”
CNN: “the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate”
So … when the press describes the mandate in those terms, is it any wonder that the general public would be under the mistaken impression that the mandate was actually written into the Affordable Care Act statute?
Now, I’m not just being nit-picky about this. If the contraceptive mandate had actually been written into the text of the ACA itself, the Supreme Court’s analysis would have been *completely* different. It is very, very, very likely that the women would have largely prevailed over their objecting employers.
As citizens, we should be demanding answers from members of Congress about this – not blaming the Supreme Court. If women’s health and access to contraception are so important (and I agree that they are!), then why didn’t our legislators PUT IT IN THE STATUTE ITSELF???
As citizens, we need to become much more savvy about the way these processes work. AND much more skeptical about the way the media describes them.
It might be narratively more compelling to write a news story that makes “the conservative Roberts Court” look like the bad guys in this case. (And, by extension, it’s easy for people to post articles on their Facebook pages that repeat that story…) But, the cold hard reality is that the outcome in the contraception case is largely on Congress -- including on the Democrats who tell us that they care about women’s health.
If I sound a little snippy, you’re right. 👀 But I’m going to keep talking about stuff like this, because I think we will all be better off when we get a more nuanced understanding of how power works in our complicated system. 🤷♂️