David Rossmiller at the Insurance Coverage Law Blog slams the AP for this lede on a spot-news story this morning:
The Supreme Court has refused to offer help to Hurricane Katrina victims who want their insurance companies to pay for flood damage to their homes and businesses.
Rossmiller calls it a "dumb lede," and goes on to explain why:
As if the choice in a case is simply going where your sympathies lie, and when the court decided not to take the appeal, the halls rang with evil laughter and mocking statements such as this: "We will extend no help to Katrina victims because we love to see them suffer and we love to support our evil twins, the insurance companies who steal from them."
He's right. And Ted Frank at Overlawyered explains a bit more of why:
The Fifth Circuit, of course, simply enforced the insurance policies as written, and noted that the word "flood" included a flood caused by the breach of the levees in New Orleans, reversing a district court that disingenuously held otherwise.
That's not at all the same as saying the Supreme Court refuses to help victims. This kind of writing -- even when done under extreme deadline pressure, as this dispatch was -- oversimplifies to the point that readers will misunderstand why a court has acted. What I object to is the spin that Frank gives it with this headline: "What liberal media bias? Part DCCXIV." Seeing this through ideological goggles is a mere reflex, but it's far too facile for its own good. I suspect what's really at work here -- and, like Frank, I'm merely guessing -- is not bias or laziness, but instead an impulse to make legal news so reader friendly (or "relatable," to borrow that loathsome phrase I've been hearing a lot lately) that we don't worry ourselves with the "technicalities." We only have to put the news in human terms -- even if, in the end, the simple-human version is wrong.
Update: In a brisk 334 words, the Times-Picayune's Susan Finch manages to explain clearly what the Supreme Court and other courts have ruled on in the Katrina insurance disputes -- without turning it into a morality play. Of course it is a morality play, of sorts, but it's a story of hardship and lack of flood insurance, not of a callous high court.
