Conservative media pundits tried and miserably failed to generate a cycle of outrage against mainstream media outlets that accurately reported this morning on the Supreme Court’s narrow ruling in a case concerning a Colorado cake maker who refused to provide service to a same-sex couple.
This morning, the Supreme Court released its ruling in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, siding 7-2 with the Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple. The case had become a rallying call for Religious Right organizations that hoped the Supreme Court ruling would set a precedent to allow business owners to discriminate against LGBTQ people on religious grounds. Instead, the Court issued a narrow decision focused on the specifics of this particular case and punted the larger constitutional questions surrounding religious liberty and free expression.
Media outlets accurately reported the narrow decision in headlines about the ruling, but some right-wing media figures desperate to expose supposed liberal bias at national news outlets conflated the narrow ruling with the vote tally. These self-described defenders of truth did not bother with the smallest amount of legal research, deciding instead to disingenuously attack of the media for accurately reporting on the ruling as part of their ongoing effort to undermine the mainstream media.
Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft dedicated an entire article to exposing his lack of basic legal knowledge.
Donald Trump Jr., an adult son of the president and his father’s liaison to the fringe, said that the 7-2 ruling on the Supreme Court was not narrow:
Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump troll and One America News contributor, accused media writing about the narrow scope of being bias. “Every time you see it,” he wrote, “you know that media out peddles left-wing bias and isn’t interested in facts”:
Peter Immanuelson, a European far-right pundit, said the ruling was “not narrow,” but rather “a huge victory”:
Kerry Picket, a reporter for Daily Caller and an NRA TV correspondent, also attempted the trope:
Jazz Shaw, the weekend editor of HotAir.com, responded with an acronym that stands for “Are You Fucking Kidding Me?”:
Gab, the Twitter knockoff popular with white nationalists who have been suspended from other social media platforms, called headlines about the narrow ruling “media sophistry”:
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt also picked up on the “sophists” line:
When these figures began to get called out for their attempt at generating an outrage cycle against the mainstream press, they began to argue that people who follow reporting on Supreme Court cases were perhaps too naïve to understand a concept like a narrow ruling.
