Pictured above is the homepage of the New York Times today, as captured by Tim Dickinson. You simply wouldn't know from looking at the headlines that women are about to be stripped of their constitutional right to an abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court. Something more important has happened, something more serious, more newsworthy: the draft ruling was, scandalously, leaked to Politico.
How can the story—the overturning of a half-century of abortion rights—be less newsworthy than the method of its discovery? How can the privacy of the justices' deliberations be more concrete than the constitutional privacy that women are about to learn they don't have anymore? How can editorial focus so consistently embody the complaints of political critics rather than tell readers what the damned news is? And it's not just the Times…
It's almost as if nothing significant is happening here to describe beyond procedural concerns in the floating world of media and politics.
