The Horror the Media Can’t Bring
Itself to Cover - By Jim Geraghty - The Campaign Spot
- National Review Online
Finally, here’s a section of the Jolt
that was heavily shaped by last night’s Twitter
discussion of Kermit Gosnell coverage — or how rare
that coverage is:
Why Is One of the Most Horrific Crimes in Recent
Memory Getting Almost No Press Coverage?
If you need to get up to speed on the Kermit Gosnell
story, here’s
a good place to start.
A doctor whose abortion clinic was a filthy,
foul-smelling “house of horrors” that was overlooked
by regulators for years was charged Wednesday with
murder, accused of delivering seven babies alive and
then using scissors to kill them.
Hundreds of other babies likely died in the squalid
clinic that Dr. Kermit Gosnell ran from 1979 to
2010, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams
said at a news conference.
“My comprehension of the English language can’t
adequately describe the barbaric nature of Dr.
Gosnell,” he added.
It’s utterly, utterly horrible; I won’t blame you if
you can’t read that story any further.
However, you may be surprised at how little you’ve
heard about this story so far. Seth
Mandel lays out the utterly unforgivable
decision-making on the part of the national media so
far:
You may not have heard much about Gosnell’s case.
That’s because the mainstream press has chosen by
and large to ignore it. There is no area of American
politics in which the press is more activist or
biased or unethical than social issues, the
so-called culture wars. And the culture of
permissive abortion they favor has consequences,
which they would rather not look squarely at, thank
you very much. The liberal commentator Kirsten
Powers has written a tremendous op-ed in USA
Today on Gosnell and the media blackout.
Powers writes of the gruesome admissions that
Gosnell’s former employees are making in court, some
of which amount to “literally a beheading” and other
stomach-turning descriptions. On the media’s refusal
to inform the public, Powers writes:
A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows
on the three major national television networks has
mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three
months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist
Peggy Noonan hijacked
a segment on Meet the Press meant to
foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in
some backward red state.
The Washington Post has not published
original reporting on this during the trial and The
New York Times saw fit to run one original
story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been
silent ever since, despite headline-worthy
testimony . . .
You don’t have to oppose abortion rights to find
late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell
trial eminently newsworthy. This is not about being
“pro-choice” or “pro-life.” It’s about basic human
rights.
The media should be ashamed beyond description for
this behavior. The American left should come to
terms with what it means to talk about a human life
as if it were a parasite, or merely a clump of
cells. And they should most certainly stop lecturing
the rest of us on compassion, on pity, on social
obligation, on morality.
The Washington Post health-policy reporter,
Sarah Kliff explains
to Mollie Hemingway, “I cover policy for the Washington
Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about
all the policy issues you mention.”
Except that a lot of “local crime” stories become
national policy or politics issues, or at the very
least get national coverage. Last night on Twitter I
went on a tear: Trayvon Martin, the Cambridge police
arresting Henry Louis Gates, O. J. Simpson, the
Unabomber, Jeffrey Dahmer, Casey Anthony, D. B.
Cooper, Bernie Madoff, Son of Sam, JonBenet Ramsey,
Andrea Yates, David Koresh & the Waco compound,
Amy Fisher . . . Heck, all of the gun massacres that
drive our periodic discussions of gun laws are
technically “local crime” stories.
You can argue about the importance of all of the
crime stories listed above, but the point is that a
lot of “local crime stories” become big national
stories. You’d think Doctor Baby-in-a-Blender would
make the cut.
Josh
Greenman, editorial-page editor of the New
York Daily News:
I humbly suggest: Whether you support abortion
rights or oppose them, read the Kermit Gosnell
coverage with clear eyes. It is wrenching.
Ace
shouts what we all know is really going on here:
This story exposes fault lines between Democrats,
who are by political necessity abortion absolutists,
and Independents, who may lean somewhat pro-choice
but sure the hell aren’t on board for infanticide.
But to report this story at all would put the
Democrats in the difficult position of angering its
an element of its hardcore single-issue leftist
coalition, or alienating independents.
Thus, the media — which just “wants to report the
facts” and “takes no positions on policy questions”
and which has no partisan leaning at all — simply
doesn’t report the story at all.
After all, if the public hears of it, they may make
The Wrong Decisions.
You don’t trust children with matches and you don’t
trust the American public with information. It’s
that simple.
