An alternative title not prepared to cater to the legally illiterate would be “Nationally Recognized Bankruptcy Specialist Earned Around $60K/Year As A Lawyer.” Social media is encouragingly pushing back at the mainstream narrative by pointing out that this story only seems to prove that Warren was underpaid for three decades of legal work proving that there are still a lot of people in the country who have a vague clue about the law. Unfortunately, the Twittersphere isn’t backed by a publishing empire.

Here we are yet again with the press trying to gin up outrage by trying to play up how much money attorneys make for their work. Yet this is a uniquely stupid episode in this ongoing trend because as journalistically irresponsible as it is to get breathless over a Biglaw partner billing a few hundred bucks an hour, it’s even dumber to try to tag someone as a hypocritical plutocrat for making $1.9 million over 30 years when there are partners making $1.9 million every six months that wouldn’t even get a society page blurb.

Enron’s creditors may have been corporations themselves, but representing them is actually in line with Warren’s central thesis that unregulated corporate greed screws people over. The breast implant work dealt with Dow buying out another company and, almost assuredly, had to do with who was on the hook for damages, as opposed to whether or not someone was on the hook. That’s pretty standard legal work. We’ve addressed before the limits of blaming attorneys for their clients. There’s not really a contradiction between arguing for Bankruptcy Code reform and counseling folks on how the current Code works.

No, what this coverage is all about is a cheap bid to turn one candidate’s transparency against them by playing to prejudices about the value of lawyers through misleading headlines.