By JACK KENNY
It was inspiring to watch wave after wave of marchers fill the screen on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) on Friday, January 27, during live coverage of this year’s demonstration against the monstrous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in America. It was, at the same time, depressing to see how the other cable news channels, including the Fox News Channel so beloved of conservatives, studiously ignored the event.
There were, of course, other things going on deemed more newsworthy. The prime minister of Great Britain was visiting the president of the United States. Gee, I guess that’s never happened before. There was President Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Whoa! Gotta get on that bandwagon before it leaves town. And of course, there was Trump, Mexico, and the wall on our southern border. Stop the presses for that one!
Trump has complained of the bias of the mainstream media, calling it, among other things, dishonest and misleading. It is an old story, one told mostly by Republicans.
We recall, for example, the press war against Nixon and vice-versa. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, surely touched a nerve when he gave a nationally televised speech on the subject nearly half a century ago.
“Media bias” has been an ongoing Republican complaint ever since, although one commentator claimed, apparently with unwitting irony, that President Ronald Reagan got “a fairer press than he deserves.”
But the targets of mainstream media bias have not always been Republicans. Jimmy Carter was not beloved by the national press corps. John F. Kennedy had his own complaints about press coverage of his administration, saying he was “reading it more and enjoying it less.” And historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, an aide to President Lyndon Johnson in the days of long ago, recently recalled the big Texan saying that if he were to walk upon the Potomac, the headlines would be, “LBJ Can’t Swim.”
Yes, media bias has been plentiful enough to go around, but in the present and through most of the past election cycle — starting at the point at which the media mavens started taking the Trump candidacy seriously — the bias against Trump has been thick enough to cut.
The weekly Meet the Press panel on NBC is usually a media crew that runs the gamut, from those moderately opposed to Trump to those extremely anti-Trump. And on the day of his inauguration, one commentator on the Trump inaugural address claimed that the new president’s call for “America First” policies carried a lot of baggage from the 1930s and early 1940s, with even “Hitlerian” overtones.
That’s a good example of Alexander Pope’s observation that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The commentator I mention obviously has a smattering of knowledge of the years between the World Wars when America Firsters wanted to keep our nation out of the war in Europe, which we eventually entered by way of war with Japan. Staying out of war seemed like a good idea after all the death and destruction and heavy debt incurred during World War I.
Conventional wisdom, blessed with hindsight, says that position was shortsighted and would have left Europe at the tender mercies of totalitarian beasts like Hitler and Stalin.
But whatever else may be said about “America First,” it was not and is not an unpatriotic position. It takes a malevolent left-wing sophistry to make it appear as such.
As for the March for Life, it may seem to some like crying wolf to claim the media gave it short shrift. It has been an annual protest for 44 years and the evening news did report that “tens of thousands” of marchers poured into Washington (it was more like hundreds of thousands, or several times the size of the famous civil rights demonstration of 1963) for the event and that the pro-life crowd was addressed in person by Vice President Mike Pence and the president’s White House counselor and former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.
But for live coverage, one had to turn to EWTN.
Even pro-lifers, however, need to be reminded that the right to life is much more than a once-a-year event at a time when an estimated 4,000 infants are killed by abortion every day in the United States alone. It is more than an annual overflow of powerful feelings on an issue that naturally stirs the passions. The abolitionists, after all, did not oppose slavery only once a year, on the anniversary of the Dred Scott decision.
We need a consistent and persistent ethic of life that gets more than lip service more than once a year. Let us keep reminding our elected officials of that, especially the ones who were elected as pro-life candidates.
The Trump administration has made a good start. Let us keep reminding them and other officials of lesser rank to, in phrases popularized in the civil rights movement, keep their “eyes on the prize” and “keep on keepin’ on.”
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