Today is March on Media Day at LiveAction and Americans United for Life, who combined with the Media Research Center for a rally in Washington today outside the studio of the local ABC affiliate. Lila Rose, Jill Stanek, and Charmaine Yoest called for more honesty in reporting the truth on abortion, calling the media “collaborators with the abortion industry.”
“The media has flinched from the reality of abortion for decades,” said Live Action President Lila Rose. “We call on the press to end the censorship of what abortion actually does to our smallest children and women, and end the lionizing of abortion advocates.”
This spring and summer has seen the media bias in full bloom on abortion. The national media couldn’t be bothered to cover the trial of Kermit Gosnell, which they initially dismissed as a “local” news story despite its potential impact on the national debate over abortion, while they thundered down to Florida as a herd to cover the George Zimmerman trial … and to Arizona for the Jodi Arias trial, whose national implications were apparently “pretty girl kills boyfriend and denies it.”
When Texas followed up on the Gosnell grand jury report to better regulate abortion mills to ensure that they operated as ambulatory surgical clinics and limited abortions to 20 weeks, the media only took an interest in the woman who tried to block the bill that had support from 62% of Texans and 61% of Texas women. The same national media who couldn’t be bothered to report on the Gosnell horror without being shamed into it — and then mostly focused on whether or not it was a real news story at all — hailed Wendy Davis as a heroine for her opposition. In fact, they gave Davis three times as much coverage in three weeks as they gave the Gosnell trial in eight weeks.
Oddly, though, they never actually pressed Davis to explain why she opposed regulating abortion clinics, given the horrors of the unregulated Gosnell clinic. When John McCormack of the Weekly Standard asked her about the majority support of women for late-term abortion bans in light of Gosnell, Davis replied that she was mainly ignorant of the Gosnell case, but claimed women overall were ignorant of the lack of risk involved.
Ignorance is the entire problem, Fox News’ Kirsten Powers writes today in the Daily Beast, and it’s “Democratic ladies” who are pushing it, abetted by a national media all too eager to demonize anyone challenging them:
Actually, the people who “don’t really understand” the issue are the Democratic ladies crusading against laws the majority of the country supports.
Despite frequently mocking anti-abortion activists as anti-science know-nothings, abortion rights absolutists are the ones who play fast and loose with the facts of abortion. Because they are so rarely asked to defend their positions, Davis and her ilk apparently don’t feel the need to be informed. Follow-up questions to their strange and often empirically false statements are almost nonexistent, while offensive or misinformed comments from GOP back benchers are greeted with full-scale media hysteria.
John McCormack has been the dogged fly in the ointment here. On a noble quest to get a response to an eminently reasonable question, he has yet to get a straight answer. In June, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi convened a press conference to condemn a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. McCormack asked her essentially the same question he asked Davis: “What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth? Pelosi answered, “You’re probably enjoying that question a lot, I can see you savoring it.” This insulting nonsense inexplicably elicited laughter from some of the assembled reporters.
It’s not really all that inexplicable, as Powers makes clear. They’re on the side of abortionists, not those who question their supporters. That remains true even when the supporters say something as jaw-dropping as Pelosi’s parting shot at McCormack:
Pelosi then expressed outrage at the line of questioning, raised the fact she had five children in six years, and snapped, “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this.” When you are pulling the Catholic card to defend your support of unrestricted late-term abortion, you’ve officially gone off the rails.
And when the rest of the reporters failed to question that statement, it just demonstrated that they’ve officially gone off the rails as well. So much for that oft-quoted (by J-school grads) media mission of “telling truth to power.”
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