Conservatives are outraged at the lack of media coverage of Kermit Gosnell, the “doctor” who performed illegal, unsanitary, dangerous late-term abortions in Pennsylvania, using scissors to snip the necks of babies delivered alive – and that’s just the tip of the horrors to be found there. Most of you, like myself, probably only found about it this week, thanks mostly to Thursday’s scathing USAToday editorial by Kirsten Powers.
Of course, there are crazy conspiracists who talk of a deliberate “media blackout” to prevent discussing a story that makes abortion look bad. I tend to agree with Dave Weigel’s more natural explanation: “members of the MSM [mainstream media] are generally socially liberal, and less likely to notice/devote attention to a story about a rogue abortionist.” Pro-lifers like me tend to ignore stories of abortion clinic bombers; pro-choicers tend to ignore stories about abortionists killing patients with disease-ridden instruments.
But even that’s not good enough for the guardians of the mainstream media, who are shocked – shocked – to hear serious accusations that it might even be possible for there to be any sort of bias in their glorious reporting. After all, conservatives are always complaining about Liberal Media Bias, which often just means the non-Fox-News media isn’t reporting things exactly the way they want. Yet sometimes the bias is so totally obvious, so completely indefensible that the media’s desperate attempts to cover themselves just makes it all look even worse.
One such paltry defense was printed in The Atlantic Wire, which boldly declares, “The Gosnell Trial Is About Many Things, but Media Bias Isn’t One of Them.” Dashiell Bennett makes three rather weak arguments. Forgive me if I sound a little more dogmatic than usual as I tear them apart.
First, Bennett says that the case was covered in the media, pointing to a handful of articles that dripped out over the last couple of years. Yes, there are misguided conservatives who think nobody in the media has touched it at all. But most Americans didn’t find out about it because the scant coverage was an order of magnitude less than other tragedies of a comparable scope.
A CNN.com search shows 20 stories about Kermit Gosnell before this week. See! Twenty whole stories! We covered it! But how does that compare to other recent trials? Jodi Arias has 286. James Holmes has 413. Casey Anthony? 1,827. NBCNews.com shows 16 articles about Kermit Gosnell, almost all from this month. Jodi Arias, 655. James Holmes, 96. Casey Anthony, 251. And let’s not get into how many times each probably got front-page placement.
There are a thousand ways to slice the data, but the fact remains that millions of people in the country heard about the murders of James Holmes, Adam Lanza, and a dozen others on the news, and almost nobody heard about the murders of Kermit Gosnell, which involved far more children dying in far more horrific ways than any of the people mentioned above. And his story just happens to be the one involving an abortion clinic?
Second, Bennett defends a lack of coverage because of the lack of interesting “policy issues” worth discussing. “If one is asking ‘should abortion clinics be regulated and safe?’ then who would possibly answer ‘No’?” See! We all agree it’s bad! So what’s there to talk about?
The gun analogies expose how silly this defense is. We all agree that children should be safe at elementary schools too, but apparently there’s a whole lot to talk about how to get us there. Megan McArdle – who is not pro-life, by the way – lets loose on this point:
There are obviously lots of policy implications of Gosnell’s baby charnel house. How the hell did this clinic operate for seventeen years without health inspectors discovering his brutal crimes? Are there major holes in our medical regulatory system? More to the point, are those holes created, in part, by the pressure to go easy on abortion clinics, or more charitably, the fear of getting tangled in a hot-button political issue? These have clear implications for abortion access, and abortion politics.
After all, when ostensibly neutral local regulations threaten to restrict abortion access – as with Virginia’s recent moves to require stricter regulatory standards for abortion clinics, and ultrasounds for women seeking abortions – the national media thinks that this is worthy of remark. If local governments are being too lax on abortion clinics, surely that is also worthy of note.
Third, Bennett claims that “the biggest media outlets have underplayed the story, because it does make viewers uncomfortable.” Yes, as if the media outlets never display anything that makes viewers uncomfortable. Sandy Hook didn’t make anyone uncomfortable?
Come on! Maybe it’s really MSM folks who are uncomfortable with the possibility that this abortion clinic was allowed to operate illegally for years because pro-choice regulators didn’t want to regulate it too closely:
…officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions…
…there was a concern that if they did routine inspections, that they may find a lot of these facilities didn’t meet [the standards for getting patients out by stretcher or wheelchair in an emergency], and then there would be less abortion facilities, less access to women to have an abortion…
In 2009, a health department official learned that a patient had died at Gosnell’s clinic. But she didn’t send out an investigator – which was her usual practice when a patient died – because the implicated facility was an abortion clinic…
So we have abortion-friendly people in government allowing these crimes against women and children to continue for years, and abortion-friendly people in the media avoiding the uncomfortable story and grasping at any possible straw to avoid admitting that they’re avoiding the uncomfortable story. And then, these same abortion-friendly people still have the gall to claim that they care more about the rights of women and children than you or me!
But the truth is finally being revealed. And the truth will set us free.