I want to set the stage for this post with a segment from this video. Watch at 11:15 seconds for about a minute and 30 seconds as Diane Sawyer flagrantly lies to millions of nightly news viewers about the Arizona Immigration law. Even Jon Stewart dislikes Sawyer's lie.

Now, step back for a minute on your judgement of today's Supreme Court Decision on Wal-Mat and gender discrimination and think about how you might at least like the truth about what happened in The Court so you can be smart in your formulations on the matter. The Court ruled unanimously on this case on the totality of the suit, but split on how things might play out in other cases.

The failure to mention the fact the all the justices came to the same conclusion about a crucial element of class action law suits: back pay. Instead, Dianne Sawyer reported this in terms of a Conservative vs. Liberal split in The Court without mentioning the unanimous decsion primary to this case--all the justices disqualified this suit.

Sawyer would have you believe a distorted reality of today's finding and it is something of a crime to not tell women the truth here: that three women justices ruled against the case in totality and only gave dissent to a part of the case related to other cases going forward.
From Politico today:

Female Wal-Mart employees who charge that the company discriminated against them because of their gender will not be able to file a massive class-action suit, the Supreme Court ruled Monday

While the court was unanimous in ruling there can be no class-action claim, it was divided on an aspect that could block future suits by workers.

Writing for the majority on part of the suit, Justice Antonin Scalia said that for a case to qualify as class action, there needs to be commonalities linking “literally millions of employment decisions at once.” In the Wal-Mart case, Scalia wrote, that connection “is entirely absent,” noting the company’s policies bar gender bias. All four other conservative justices agreed with his view.

But in a dissenting opinion for liberal justices on the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the cases of all the company’s female employees are linked. “Wal-Mart’s delegation of discretion over pay and promotions is a policy uniform throughout all stores,” she said

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57343.html#ixzz1Psmi75dz

At least they mentioned the unanimous ruling, but without back pay suits lack teeth.

Here is something from NYTimes which fails to mention all the women justices voted against back pay in this case:

John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at the Columbia University School of Law, said one far-reaching aspect of the ruling was that it would greatly discourage lawyers from filing class actions because the court essentially prevented lawyers from adding a claim for back pay or other financial compensation onto a class claim seeking an injunction against conduct, like a company’s discriminating against women in promotions. Under federal law, the standards to gain class-action status when seeking injunctive relief are considerably lower than for back-pay claims.

The Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal had long allowed plaintiffs to do such “bootstrapping” in injunction cases to achieve class-action status for their claims for back pay. Class actions for injunctive relief are less lucrative to plaintiffs and their lawyers than class actions that also seek back pay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/business/21class.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewan...

Finding who ruled how on the back pay issue is not mentioned in this story. Odd, donchathink? Nevermind about not mentioning the unanimous ruling. The females where united: no back pay.

Sawyer said the decision was split with the women up against the big bad Scalia but that was not the truth or a truth so sadly lacking in what actually occurred that it hurt to watch. Sawyer did not lie in outright fashion today as she did about the immigration law, but she came as close as she could in her effort to fire up women to vote for Obama come next fall.
Women are smart enough to handle the truth about how other women voted on the Wal-Mart case. Stop treating the public like imbeciles. An interesting story would be why the women voted as they did on the totality of the case including the denial of back pay. I believe this issue is very complex and wouldn't it be nice to have an honest media broker (lawyer by trade) demystify it for us so we can all be better informed rather than mislead and more partisan.

If there is a better way to get female equality in the workforce that the three female justices had in mind, I'd like to hear it. Will the real Ms. Journalist stand up and report this for us?

From Salon:
http://www.salon.com/news/the_supreme_court/index.html?story=/news/featu...