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(Am I the only person who finds it maddening that in the year 2025 newspapers still don't bother to link to the easily-findable publications that they base their reporting on?)
I think that's a fair criticism, but I think there are at least three strong points arguing against your interpretation, which are also mentioned in the judgment:
The Equality Act 2010 was meant to replace the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Sex Discrimination Regulations 1999, which predate the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and obviously intended to use the biological definition. There is no evidence to suggest the lawmakers intended to change the definition of man and women.
The Gender Recognition Act creates a distinction between legal sex and biological sex; it does not abolish biological sex (how could it?). Interpreting the EA as referencing biological sex is not inconsistent with the GRA, especially since this is the most common interpretation. You could argue that if the EA wanted sex to be interpreted as legal sex, it should have defined this explicitly, and since it doesn't, it could be reasonably assumed to default to biological sex.
The EA only refers to “pregnant women” and never “pregnant men”. This implies the word "woman" refers to biological sex, because it would be unthinkable for a law to exclude biologically female legal men (trans men) from protection of discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.
I admit I'm biased because I oppose genderism in most of its forms, but I think the judgment is defensible.
This is especially egregious, and in my opinion actively harmful, when it comes to legal reporting. Holding aside for the moment my opinion of most legal reporters (it generally can be summarized as starting with "t" and ending with "oo fucking stupid to pour water from a boot if instructions were written on the heel") the average person struggles to access published court decisions. Federal decisions are squirreled away in PACER, a database that has not seen the light of a UI update since 1995, and state court decisions are usually buried deep in a PACER knockoff that is somehow worse than the original. Some states of course actually make it fairly easy to find decisions, but many do not. As if that were not annoying enough, legal reporting almost never actually names the goddamn case they are reporting on. Sure if you're reading AboveTheLaw or a site curated by an actual attorney it'll cite the case because our 1L legal writing professors beat the bluebook into our heads with a ball-peen hammer, but the New York Times? Washington Post? Any newspaper read by normies? Nada. Oh sure you can usually piece it together (Name1 v. Name2/Name v. State/State v. Name) but how is the actual NAME OF THE CASE YOU ARE REPORTING ON not included by default?
This is a bone I've had to pick for a while, but it really crystalized during the most recent round of reporting on the Tate brothers' civil suit in Florida. Trying to find an actual copy of the judge's motion ruling took me deep into the bowels of Florida's case search database (one of the aforementioned PACER knockoffs) and while I was able to find the original document eventually, it would have been so much easier if the journalists had just linked to the damn thing, or even written down the case citation somewhere in the body of their article.
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I straight up think it should be intensely shameful bordering on illegal for journalists to publish news articles about scientific studies or judgements without a link to the original.
We have hypertext, I don't have to be locked into reading only your loose poor quality recollection of events goddammit.
More infuriating is that sometimes the only thing that survives is the shitty article.
I suspect that half the time the journalist a) hasn't read the study, and b) is only rewording a press release from either the university or activist group associated with the study. You can tell by the way all articles on a study will use identical framing and share particular phrases that aren't quotes from the study itself. Frequently they all make the same odd mistake, like a typo, mislabeled figure, or metric conversion.
The big universities have entire offices dedicated to research publicity, and of course it's the entire goal of most non-profit "institutes."
From reading a lot about insulation and heat pumps I've developed a spider sense for "this entire news article was written by a Rocky Mountain Institute publicist"
Outside a handful of prestige outlets (and even then...) it's shocking to me just how many times my self-interested, comms department-approved talking points have shown up verbatim and uncredited in supposedly neutral news articles. Literally all you have to do is be the pithiest of the two or three people they bother emailing to ask for comment on a story, and they'll usually print whatever you tell them without the slightest effort to push back or verify. (And keep in mind, this is in a context where the journalists have no intrinsic interest in taking my employer's side. Imagine how easy this must be for prominent advertisers, favored politicians, etc.)
In my experience, journalists have exactly two settings: "libelously hostile" and "please just write my copy for me," depending on what their deadline looks like.
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I’ve mentioned it before but my former journalist friend (working for a major newspaper, but think BBC news site not the NYT) was required to write 8 articles a day. There just isn’t the time for more than
That might be true on average - i.e. space-padding articles that are forgotten they moment you're finished reading. I doubt that's how narrative-setting ones about hot CW issues are written.
Probably - my understanding is that the top NYT writers might get weeks, which is why I specified that he wasn’t one of those. I just think it’s an interesting fact that deserves to be more widely known.
Yeah when you write features you get a set amount of time you work out with your editor based on the estimate of the amount of time and work you'll have to put in. It can range from anywhere from 24 hours (usually a group project) to years (although that's more for when a publisher wants to hire a well respected author so they'll go to to their dinner party). When you write copy, you slam it out as fast as you can. Copy used to be a path to feature writing or correspondence, but nowadays it's just a molochian devourer.
Right, that’s why my friend got out of it. That, and the fact that editors tend to be so heavy-handed you can’t recognise what you wrote when they’re done with it.
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Yep this is it exactly on the journos behalf. Except change half to 90% - and that's being charitable. The publishers could change this but don't however, because they don't want people leaving their site for any reason ever. What if they don't come back!? They are often right to be afraid - after all why continue reading some moron's interpretation of a study when you can just read the study itself? Or why listen to a journo's memory of a politician's policies when you can check out their website and discover them for yourself?
And scientists don't really mind (as much as they complain about science journalism among themselves), because nothing gets citation numbers up like journo spam.
How would it being difficult to find their paper lead to more citations?
What?
Journalists excluding information that makes it easy to find your paper does little to help you get citations.
No, because anyone in a field close enough to cite you will easily find and have access to your paper through their university. But they're a lot more likely to a) hear about it and b) want to associate their own work with it if they hear about the paper on NPR rather than skimming through issue #1708 of the Journal of Queering Anthropology (which nobody ever actually does)
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The standard of precision you expect in 2 and 3 makes them seem like they are just grasping for straws.
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It drives me mad. I can only conclude that most newspapers don’t want people to easily be able to read the opinion so they can editorialize what it says. People having to Google the actual opinion requires probably enough effort to deter a non insignificant number of people. Choice architecture matters.
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