Media and Patriot Act

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy posts on a recent court decision and the media's explanation of it:

As I noted in my post below, a recent decision of the Southern District of New York struck down part of a 1986 law known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. How does the press report the decision? No mention of the 1986 law, of course. Instead, the press is reporting that the court struck down a major part of the Patriot Act, in a blow to the Bush Administration's overzealous response to terrorism. As I trace the history of the statute, this is quite inaccurate: the basic law was implemented in 1986, almost 20 years ago. To be fair, the Patriot Act did amend some language in this section; just not in a relevant way. As best I can tell, the court's decision does not rely on or even address anything in the Patriot Act. (See page 14-22 of the Court's opinion for the details of the statute's history.)

Read his entire post. This seems to be a lot of the difficulty about having a sensible debate on the merits or detriments of the Patriot Act. The media presents us with a skewed vision of what the Patriot Act really is and what it means. Most blogs aren't any better at covering this issue, because it is complex and people have very strong feelings on this sort of thing. It makes it difficult to sort out the facts from the hyperbole.