Homologies between the rhetoric of tort reform and the media reporting of tort disputes that Chapter Five found in general are apparent in perhaps the single most famous news story that became a tort tale, the saga of the 79-year-old woman who sued for burns from McDonald’s coffee.  Haltom and McCann first analyze practices of selective attention and inattention evident in both spot news and editorials.  They then trace the diffusion of the lawsuit legend across a wide variety of popular electronic news and entertainment media.  These cross-sectional and longitudinal looks not only reinforce the institutional propensities explained in Chapter Five but also reveal an individualistic ideology at work in stories about Ms. Stella Liebeck and her 49-cent coffee.  Haltom and McCann take no position on whether the hot coffee case was rightly decided by the jury or the judge.  Rather, they show how the story was processed through the juridico-entertainment complex to confirm moralistic rants and to preclude informed public deliberation about the reasonableness of the litigation.