Neil Gorsuch sworn in as Supreme Court justice.
After Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the New York Times (2/13/17) explored whether Democrats should oppose the nomination as payback for Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama’s replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia. The Times’ headline: “Democrats’ Quandary on Gorsuch: Appease the Base or Honor the Process.” Spoiler: The paper thinks the real strain is on “those in the middle.”
Another media theme was Gorsuch’s “eloquence” and his being “hard to pigeonhole” as conservative: One Times story (2/11/17) said he “didn’t skip a beat” when a friend came out to him as gay.
Stories about Gorsuch’s record on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals focused on his justifiably concerning ruling that granted the Hobby Lobby chain store the right to deny employees contraception coverage, which described birth control, falsely, as “destroying a fertilized human egg.”
But the lens corporate media use for Supreme Court nominees has some blind spots. In this case, you could read all the elite press had to offer on Gorsuch and never hear about human rights for people with disabilities. You’d need to find ACLU attorney Claudia Center’s piece on her group’s website (2/3/17) to learn about Hwang vs. Kansas State University—a case brought by assistant professor Grace Hwang, who was returning to work after a leave of absence for cancer treatment when the campus broke out in a flu epidemic, leading her to request to work from home for a short period as her immune system was weakened.
Gorsuch sided with the school’s claim that this request was unreasonable, saying that disability rights rules aren’t meant to “turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work.” That call, which Center notes represented errors of both law and fact, went against every other circuit decision on the issue, as well as guidance from the EEOC and the Supreme Court. But a search of major media on “Gorsuch” and “Hwang” turned up zero stories.
Despite disabled people constituting, according to the Census Bureau, nearly 1 in 5 of the US population, how the highest court in the land may affect their ability to work and live just isn’t that interesting to corporate media. With a president that openly mocks disabled people, that kind of disinterest is even more dangerous.
