Culture Of Life 101… “Are The Mainline Media Really Biased On Abortion?”

By BRIAN CLOWES

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For a document containing hundreds of examples of bias by the mainstream media, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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“The statesman is an easy man,/ he tells his lies by rote;/ The journalist makes up his lies/ and takes you by the throat” — William Butler Yeats, The Old Stone Cross.
My wife Kathy and I remember our pro-life activism in the Democratic People’s Republic of Oregon. It didn’t take us long to become attuned to grossly unjust treatment at the hands of the local media.
We saw our first taste of it when we went to vote during the 1984 elections. Our city newspaper, The Oregonian, published a list of its voting recommendations. This list was always 100 percent Democratic, with the sole exception of the occasional Republican pro-abortionist like U.S. Sen. Bob “Lightning Lips” Packwood. After we voted, we saw trash cans full of these lists of recommendations, showing that many people did not even bother to think about the candidates or the issues — they just obediently followed The Oregonian’s lead.
We picketed the Portland Feminist Women’s Health Center abortion mill every Saturday morning. When the media appeared, they would ignore us, walk into the abortuary, and interview the workers. The only time they would talk to a pro-lifer was when “David,” a homeless person, appeared. He carried a battered briefcase from which he would extract chalk and candles to scrawl a hexagram on the sidewalk and loudly invoke the Archangel Michael to appear and “smite” the abortion mill. The media loved him, and he soon became the best-known pro-lifer in Portland.
When there were rescue missions at Portland abortion mills, the media were all over it, interviewing abortion mill workers and sobbing women who had allegedly been brutalized by us “anti-choice thugs.” But when police mercilessly beat handcuffed and unresisting pro-lifers with nightsticks, suddenly the people with the cameras lost interest and wandered away. They also studiously ignored screaming, cursing, spitting pro-aborts assaulting pro-lifers.
As one cameraman said when questioned about this following a rescue in Buffalo, “There would be a revolution in this country if people ever saw who supported abortion rights.”
And then, of course, there is Nellie Gray’s National March for Life. In 1990, The Washington Post buried a single short story on the March in the middle of its Metro (local) news section.
What a contrast to its treatment of the previous year’s “March for Reproductive Choice!”
The Post published five major stories on the event in the week before it took place. On the day of the March, the paper’s magazine featured a five-page story on it and included a map which showed the March route, all road closings, lost and found information, and how to sign up and get there by subway or bus. The Post featured no less than five major stories on the March for Choice the day after it took place, including a front-page color picture and 7,000 words of total text, equivalent to three full pages of newspaper space.
When confronted with this glaring disparity in reporting, Post reporters claimed that they were just “tired of covering demonstrations,” thereby winning the unofficial award for the lamest excuse in the history of journalism.

Violence: A Gift To The Media

When self-described anti-abortionists took a tragic turn into violence and murdered eight people during the time period 1993 to 1998, you could almost see members of the media giggle with delight. Before the first murder, their charges that the entire pro-life movement was just a bunch of “violent fanatics” carried little weight.
Now it was credible.
These killings were exactly what the media needed to paint the entire pro-life movement with the broad brush of violent fanaticism. Ever since, practically every story even remotely concerned with abortion is tinged with the idea that pro-lifers are always about to start murdering everyone in sight. I cannot count the number of times I have seen television coverage of peaceful pro-life protests, concluding with a statement along the lines of, “There was no violence [pause] — today.”
Meanwhile, at least 600 women have died at the hands of incompetent abortionists, and the same media that trumpeted such deaths before Roe v. Wade are almost completely silent now. After all, when women die of illegal abortions, they can be used as propaganda tools, but when they die of legal abortions, reporting on their deaths could hurt the abortion industry.
Similarly, the media have paid no attention to the frequent murders of women who refuse abortion. More than 400 pregnant women have been shot, beaten to death, tortured, and even buried alive by their husbands or boyfriends because they refused to abort, but local media stories on the murders almost invariably omit the motive for the murders (see www.abortionviolence.com for documentation on all of these deaths).
And when abortionists murder people, the media are right there to help cover for them. For example, John Baxter Hamilton, the most prolific abortionist in Oklahoma City, crushed his wife’s skull with a blunt object, then returned to his abortion mill to do more abortions. The national media outlets refused to identify Hamilton as an abortionist, referring to him only as a local obstetrician.
A number of other abortionists have been convicted of murder, including Malachy DeHenre, Alicia Ruiz Hanna, John Biskind, Bruce Steir, and Kermit Gosnell, but the media refuse to connect the dots as they do with pro-lifers. In fact, the more spectacular crimes committed by abortionists are usually just covered up, as when Arizona abortionist Brian Finkel sexually molested hundreds of his patients, or when abortionist Alan Zarkin carved his initials on a patient’s abdomen with a scalpel because “he thought he did such a beautiful job, he thought he should sign it.”
But let a pro-lifer violate a building code, and it is a huge deal to the media.
On September 11, 2009, Harlan James Drake walked up to pro-life picketer Jim Pouillon and shot him point-blank four times with a large handgun because he considered Jim’s signs “inappropriate.” What followed was disgusting even by media standards. The local newspaper, the Flint Journal, devoted significant resources in its attempt to discredit Jim, and proudly reported on the same day he was murdered that he was guilty of such ghastly crimes as a housing code violation, a zoning violation, “disturbing a worker,” and a pedestrian violation.
The paper said nothing about Drake’s background.
To show how unimportant Jim’s death was to the national media, his name bubbled up to about halfway in the Google News search page for about three hours on the day he was murdered, and then disappeared completely, while murdered third-trimester abortionist George Tiller — who made a living killing viable children — headed the page for two solid weeks.
And then, of course, there is Kermit Gosnell. His case had everything the media usually love: a repulsive main character who is the most prolific serial killer in the nation’s history and a major drug dealer, a disgusting “House of Horrors,” a nest of racketeers, massive government corruption, and allied activist groups that looked the other way. If the cast of characters had been Catholic priests and nuns, the coverage would have been wall to wall for months, and Hollywood studios would be fighting each other to be the first to release a “major motion picture” on the story.
But in this case, since Gosnell was an abortionist, the mainstream media did their absolute best to cover up the trial and pretend that it never took place.
To show how lopsided the coverage was, NBA player Jason Collins announced he was homosexual, and the media did 2,381 major news stories on him. By comparison, the media did just 115 stories on the eight-day Gosnell trial.
When a pro-life publicity campaign finally shamed the media into covering the trial, they often went to bat for Gosnell. Although he delivered full-term babies and then murdered them, The New York Times said six times in one article that he was guilty of killing “fetuses.” The Associated Press fawned over Gosnell and called him “an elegant man.” Many of the stories on the trial fretted that Gosnell’s case could lead to restrictive laws governing abortion; the women and newborn babies he killed were rarely mentioned.
Huffington Post host Marc Lamont Hill admitted that “for what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left.”
And The Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger wrote, “I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights.”
Why are the media so corrupt?
We’ll look into this question in the next column.