Quote:
Originally Posted by Chloé Palmas
Okay I will give you an example here, Maggy. A few days back the ruling on the CO baker (who refused to participate in gay marriages) won his case in the high court not to have bake cakes for gay weddings, whilst not falling foul of CO's civil rights laws:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.dff35124ccf7
Now the decision was 7-2 in favor of him. What did WaPo / USA Today etc all run with as a headline?
Now this was not narrow - not by any stretch of the imagination. A narrow decision by the Supremes is usually 5-4. Sure this is not a unanimous decision (no dissenting votes) but by no stretch of the imagination is this "narrow".
Notice how they took out the word narrow? Now they knew what the majority was all along - they knew that it wasn't 5 to 4. They still editorialized it as "narrow" to begin with.
USA Today was the same - I did check through the AP and these were not linking of an AP story, nor Reuters. They had their own individual reporting on the issue. This, in no way was a narrow decision - you have to be numerically challenged to think that.
Yet in this case, a 7 to 2 ruling was close? They knew how full of it they were so they did issue corrections but their sheer audacity to print such stuff is staggering.
So, you tell me - is that fake news? Whether it is indicative of the entire WaPo is another matter but the article headline is clearly wrong given their own admission and corrections later, but does that constitute fake news? You be the judge. |
They called it a narrow
decision or
ruling, not a narrow
victory. I.E The decision was limited to a very narrow scope.
That's why a lot of outlets called it narrow.
PBS:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politic...x-wedding-cake
Quote:
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.
The justices’ limited ruling turned on what the court described as anti-religious bias on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission when it ruled against baker Jack Phillips. The justices voted 7-2 that the commission violated Phillips’ rights under the First Amendment.
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This blog is a neutral one which follows the Supreme Court from a legal perspective and they called it narrow:
http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/op...ing-cake-case/
Quote:
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The Supreme Court ruled today in favor of Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to make a custom cake for a same-sex couple because he believed that doing so would violate his religious beliefs. This was one of the most anticipated decisions of the term, and it was relatively narrow: Although Phillips prevailed today, the opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy rested largely on the majority’s conclusion that the Colorado administrative agency that ruled against Phillips treated him unfairly by being too hostile to his sincere religious beliefs. The opinion seemed to leave open the possibility that, in a future case, a service provider’s sincere religious beliefs might have to yield to the state’s interest in protecting the rights of same-sex couples, and the majority did not rule at all on one of the central arguments in the case – whether compelling Phillips to bake a cake for a same-sex couple would violate his right to freedom of speech.
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This isn't a Trump thing. People have used this phrasing before to refer to court decisions whose impact is limited. Here is an article from 2014:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-...rrow-decisions
Anyone saying victory would be wrong, calling it a narrow ruling appears to a correct way to talk about a legal ruling.