History May Not Be Forgotten Soon . . . But How Many Errors Sprout In Its Telling?

By DEXTER DUGGAN

Noting the recent fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when two astronauts put the first footprints on the moon, in July 1969, the New York Daily News said walker number one was John Glenn.
That wasn’t the only error in the article posted from the all-knowing world media headquarters of New York City, but was the most significant. Neil Armstrong was the first to step onto the moon. Glenn, who was the first American to orbit the Earth seven years earlier, in 1962, wasn’t even along for the ride on Apollo 11.
Recall the saying that once you hear two different witness accounts of the same automobile accident, you start to worry about the accuracy of history. Although many people still are alive from a half-century ago and vividly remember Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s lunar steps, many others on this earthly surface weren’t even conceived yet.
The latter group, like most people learning what happened before their time, have no personal knowledge of the events but only what they’re told. The reason they may know that Abraham Lincoln in 1865 wasn’t the U.S. president who defeated Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists in 1945 is that authoritative accounts say so.
Another recollection in 2019 of the 1969 moon mission, in the London-based Daily Mail, presented old photos — one of which, the Mail said, showed a crowd in Florida watching “as the astronauts were thrust into the Earth’s atmosphere.”
But isn’t the atmosphere what we’d say we walk around in every day? How about saying the explorers were rocketed through the stratosphere or mesosphere?
As the decades marched by, Donald Trump was hardly the first news consumer to call attention to media errors — and not merely sloppy ones perhaps built on inadequate information, but also malicious reporting.
Conservatives used to joke that The Wall Street Journal was “The Banana” — you had to peel off the outside to get to the good stuff. That is, the reader had to flip past the news pages, which often reflected familiar liberal journalistic bias, to get to informed conservative thought on the opinion pages.
That’s less true after media magnate Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal in 2007 and tried to bring more balance to the news side of the operation. But the paper’s coverage still should be approached with skepticism that serves as a handy corrective.
Meanwhile, the New York Times, Washington Post and others in their orbit resemble a banana only to the extent that if you try to stand firm for the accuracy of their coverage, you’ll slip and take a nasty fall.
How many major-media reporters regard pro-lifers as friendly, familiar sources? Probably not so many when newspaper stylebooks disallow “pro-life” as a neutral descriptive, but obediently parrot the other side’s preferred label of “abortion rights.”
The front page of the July 18 Wall Street Journal headlined an article “Antiabortion Unity Begins to Crack; New wing aims for direct Roe challenge with heartbeat bills, dividing legal strategy.”
Interesting that an alleged fracturing of “anti-abortionists” demanded front-page attention exactly two days after abortion-pushing, troubled Planned Parenthood decided to push out its president who began serving in that post only last November, Leana Wen, MD — a firing that the Journal addressed on its July 18 editorial page, “A Coup at Planned Parenthood.”
The first paragraph of the Journal’s front-page misinformation said, “Close to five decades after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling…the unity of the antiabortion movement is cracking.”
An “ascendant, activist wing” was said to be pressing not to limit the procedure but to outlaw it, even though “(f)or years” the pro-life legal strategy largely had been “to pass laws adding incremental limitations to the historic 1973 ruling,” two Journal reporters claimed.
Does one laugh or cry?
While the aim always has been to restore the legal protection to the preborn that was stripped away suddenly on January 22, 1973, pro-life strategies evolved as the pro-abortion legal and media establishments demonstrated a fanatical fealty to maintaining an unconstitutional usurpation.
The Journal might have chosen a different story angle, such as saying that the versatile pro-life movement is able to take diverse approaches, but that wouldn’t have served its crack-up narrative.
Just to the left of this article, by the way, was a feature article about all the energy being exerted in Minnesota to help a suffering wild bear with a plastic trash lid accidentally stuck around his head.
When these two stories were jumped inside to page 8, the wild bear got approximately the top one-fourth of the page, including a drawing of the critter wearing the lid like a Tudor ruff, while the bottom three-quarters of the page had the abortion story, including one map, one chart, and one photo.
As for the Journal’s asserting a longtime “incremental” abortion strategy, at first pro-lifers, who had started to reverse the pro-abortion tide before early 1973, were shocked at the sheer ignorance and arrogance thrust forward by the High Court. Surely, a lot of us thought, the justices would come to realize their gross errors before long and undo the damage.
But just seven justices were determined that they alone had abortion wisdom eluding everyone else. Could husbands have any say about the permissive abortion of their babies? No! Could legislators require that abortions be done only in safer hospital settings, not storefront abortuaries? No! And on it went.
Tens of millions of innocents would die, but the pride of seven mistaken men must not be pricked. A ruling that was created entirely from thin air and “penumbras,” like a rabbit in a magician’s hat, suddenly was held to be settled, unchallengeable precedent.
Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton might make no sense, and would come to be viewed as awful “law” even by candid liberals, but they imposed on society what the elite decided society must have.
Shortly after the High Court spoke, liberal law professor John Hart Ely, of Yale University, wrote in the April 1973 Yale Law Journal: “It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.

Creative Approaches

Early pro-life strategy simply was to undo Roe and Doe with a Human Life constitutional amendment, which wouldn’t necessarily be easy to pass, but that seemed the only alternative if the court wouldn’t correct itself on permissive abortion.
Even the elitists’ much-blessed Equal Rights Amendment never passed, not even after Congress later gave it a legally dubious extended time period for ratification.
When it became plain how difficult the amendment route would be, even when many more pro-life Democrats were in Congress, other avenues were tried.
The Journal article gives no awareness of the background as creative leaders and their organizations, being creative, explored alternatives.
To touch on only a few of many examples, the American Life League split from National Right to Life, and pioneering activist Joe Scheidler went from Illinois Right to Life to create the Pro-Life Action League. One charismatic national pro-life leader lost her position when others thought she acted as if she alone knew the answers.
If a Human Life Amendment was stalled, let’s try a Human Life Bill. Let’s have congressional hearings on one, then the other. How about a states’ rights amendment on abortion?
Here’s a scrap of paper where I had typed, apparently in 1982, “Friction within the pro-life movement over the Human Life Bill emerged openly when Sen. Orrin Hatch expressed his doubts about the bill as hearings on it began in a format from which he withdrew his co-sponsorship.”
It’s human imperfection in search of success against an overwhelming establishment — a burrowed-in, furtive establishment that later, in his own way, Donald Trump was to challenge, too.
The Journal article mainly seemed lacking in knowledge, context, and perspective, but that’s hardly the first time stubborn fake news sprouted from starved soil.
Missouri historian James Hitchcock still declines to acknowledge even a single error in his 2016 book peppered with falsehoods against me, Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics. Hitchcock is sticking with his stories, even though he didn’t even get my name correct in the one brief reply he wrote to me, in June 2019.