So, as I mentioned yesterday, the editors at FoxNews.com wrote a misleading headline for my column yesterday. Not only did the subhead confuse the abortion pill with the morning after pill, but the main headline also implied that the entire column was a defense of an individual pharmacist’s “right” to refuse to dispense to which he has moral objections, regardless of the policies of his employer.

Of course, the column itself doesn’t say that. It says that should such a scenario arise, a pharmacist can certainly refuse to dispense the medication, but that his employer should also then be free to fire him for it. The column was essentially a plea for no legislation on this issue, and an attack on partisans on both sides of the abortion/birth control debate for attempting to legislate their views onto everyone else.

But the headline implied otherwise, and the mistake actually proved to be instructive when contemplating future feedback. I got a significant amount of email from people who attacked me for advocating that pharmacists should be able to defy their employers, and that their employers should be barred from firing them for it. The column of course, explicitly says otherwise.

Which means that lots of people simply read the headline, then fired off an angry email without actually reading the copy. That probably won’t surprise you. But the number of people who did so certainly surprised me. I’d say somewhere between “dozens” and less than a hundred.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 11:17 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.