NP: The Futureheads, The Chaos

I tend to go back and forth on Steve Benen over at Washington Monthly. He tends to talk about important subjects, and raises good points, but ten times out of ten, he'll opt for righteous indignation by "wondering out loud" about questions he claims don't have good answers. All that does is score partisan points with a certain faction of the left wing, so I don't care for it.

Today, it's coverage of the lower court rulings on the Affordable Care Act, and how the decisions that upheld the law have gotten less coverage than those that have found the individual mandate unconstitutional. Benen suspects media complicity with (or fealty towards) Republican talking points, asking "If there's a sensible explanation for this, I'd love to hear it."

There's at least one sensible explanation. Declaring a law unconstitutional is a bigger deal than declaring it isn't. It's "man bites dog" versus "dog bites man," on some level. That doesn't make it right, or discount the notion that there might be some biases built into the system. It just strikes me as disingenuous to claim you can't think of a single, rational explanation aside from the major media doing the bidding of the GOP. That's just a failure of imagination.

Now that I think about it, there are at least two sensible explanations, in that the articles on the anti-reform rulings might actually have some content on the earlier rulings as well, but I really don't need to read through eight to ten stories on the Vinson decision in order to find out.