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Taylor: Ledbetter law news coverage stank

By Mark Obbie

Journalists covering Congress' passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act have "thoroughly distorted the facts" in that policy debate, continuing a pattern that began with "an explosion of ill-informed media outrage" after Ledbetter's Supreme Court loss in 2007. So writes National Journal's Stuart Taylor, who backs his opinions with his usual array of convincing facts and tightly constructed arguments. The core of his argument is that the law is an overreaction to the (arguable) deficiency in the old law that the Ledbetter case revealed. Rather than simply fix the restrictive time limits on Title VII suits, he argues, the new law goes so far that it invites a litigation frenzy that will hurt employers and only help plaintiffs' lawyers. Because of Taylor's reputation for reason and reported fact, because he's not an ideologue, and because he concedes an argument to Ledbetter's supporters (about the reasonableness of time limits), he makes me suspect that we've just witnessed a massive journalistic failure in one of the first big policy shifts of the new president's administration. On the other hand, he undercuts some of his credibility with me when he blithely includes the media in his indictment of the parties that twisted their interpretations of the new law "to advance their agenda of opening the door wide to all manner of job-discrimination lawsuits." Taylor provides no evidence that reporters covering this debate (as opposed to pundits and bloviators) shared this agenda with lobbyists and other advocates. It's conceivable, but equally conceivable is that reporters were simply snowed by partisans and/or too lazy to pin down the facts. Despite that weakness, Taylor's argument is important and worth considering. Hurry, because National Journal eventually puts his articles behind the subscriber wall. (Via National Review's Bench Memos)

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 30, 2009 (boomark / email).