Friday, May 25, 2012
"Massive lawsuits, minor coverage"
I know, I know -- "conservative" claims about "media bias" are really just disigenuous efforts by Rove-ian right-wingers to distract attention from the awesome power of Fox News, EWTN, and Rush Limbaugh. Still, as the folks at Get Religion discuss in detail, the near-silence of many traditional media outlets regarding this week's lawsuits by Catholic institutions against the administration is striking (and contrasts glaringly with their consistent and close interest in other kinds of legal proceedings involving such institutions). It's almost as if -- I know, I know, it's not, but still . . . -- some people with significant power over information flow are trying to minimize, in an election year, the extent to which the word gets out that the administration is being sued by 40-plus Catholic institutions, schools, and social-service agencies for violating fundamental religious-freedom rights. Of course, this relative silence is for the best, since the blogosphere's armchair lawyers and mind-readers have assured me that the lawsuits are frivolous, premature, divisive, and / or deviously partisan, and we wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/05/massive-lawsuits-minor-coverage.html
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Isn't it possible that this alleged minimization of coverage (an exercise of the media's acknowledged First Amendment rights, of course) is actually and ironically doing the Church a favor? It might be argued that the less publicity the better for the Church, given the staggering percentage of Catholics who disagree with the Church's stance on contraception, and given the number of Catholics (and others) who work for Catholic entities who rely on employment-based health insurance to pay for their contraception. If the Church prevails, these employees may end up (in the absence of insurance) having to shoulder the expense of non-covered birth control for themselves. At some point, it will occur to the fertile women (and maybe even to their male partners) who work for Church entities that this lawsuit does not serve their interests.