By DEXTER DUGGAN
After Donald S. Smith, the film producer who made the groundbreaking Silent Scream pro-life film in the mid-1980s, died in late January at age 94, his obituary in The New York Times was 15 paragraphs long under a two-column headline, with a one-column photo of Smith seated by a bookcase in his younger days.
The Times wasn’t brushing off his death. But the Times was mad, as it usually is when the welfare of its beloved massive permissive abortion is questioned. When people doubt abortion, the Times is far, far angrier than seeing the injustice of actually tearing off the limbs of countless preborn babies, or injecting poison into their hearts, or sucking out their brains.
In those earlier days of ultrasound, The Silent Scream’s demonstration of a young baby being aborted drew curiosity and attention across the nation. “Among the movie’s admirers,” the Times obituary written by Neil Genzlinger noted, was the president at that time, Ronald Reagan.
Smith obtained the sonogram imagery from Dr. Bernard Nathanson, wrote Genzlinger, an obituarist who had all the resources of the Times available for his research, but he was sketchy about the significance of Nathanson, whom he described as “an obstetrician-gynecologist who had once performed abortions but had become an abortion opponent.”
That’s about like describing Barack Obama as a Hawaiian who entered politics.
From the Times’ reticence, one might think Nathanson had answered a medical advertisement one day to do some abortions from time to time. The Times and Genzlinger steered readers away from recalling Nathanson’s significance in his turn against abortion because his conversion was yet another repudiation of the Times’ fanaticism.
Before eventually becoming a strong pro-lifer, Nathanson was an avid pro-abortion radical who personally performed or supervised tens of thousands of abortions. Right in the Times’ hometown of New York City, he served as the director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, the world’s largest abortion clinic.
In 1969 he had been co-founder of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) and taunted Planned Parenthood over its reluctance to engage fully in his revolution.
Although these days people correctly regard Planned Parenthood as militantly pro-abortion, Nathanson recalled that he’d prodded the organization over its bashfulness before Roe v. Wade. In his 1979 book, Aborting America (Doubleday), where Nathanson explained how he came to reject his pro-abortion ways, he wrote (p. 70):
“NARAL had frequently voiced disappointment at Planned Parenthood’s indolence and timidity on the issue….(W)e felt that this massive organization, with its almost limitless funds and extensive facilities, was dragging its feet inexcusably. I did not mince words. I took them to task for what we saw as their fearfulness and stinginess.”
After his pro-life conversion, Nathanson also noted that the Times, so pleased with him as a pro-abortion activist, lost interest once he went to the other side.
A reader needn’t expect that the Times’ obituary of Smith go into detail over a different man, but its brush-off of Nathanson’s significant reputation was intentionally misleading.
Even the obituary in the far less privileged Wenatchee (Wash.) World — the town where Smith moved late in life — managed to acknowledge Nathanson as “the manager of the world’s largest abortion clinic, in New York City,” who became pro-life after studying ultrasound images of a baby’s suction abortion.
What the Times did have more energy and space for, however, was denigrating Smith’s best-known achievement, The Silent Scream. Unless the deceased person now beyond the ability to respond was a notorious wrongdoer, a little tolerance by the obituarist of the self-proclaimed “tolerant” Times might be seemly.
However, in the very first paragraph of typical Times loathing of benevolent pro-lifers, dead or live ones, Smith was called “an anti-abortion crusader,” The Silent Scream was “controversial,” and it only “professed to show a fetus” in distress over being aborted.
Three paragraphs later, The Silent Scream was said to be “widely criticized as exploitative and scientifically suspect by Planned Parenthood and other groups, but it became a pivotal weapon of the anti-abortion movement.”
The next paragraph quoted the strongly pro-abortion Los Angeles Times that whether the film was “(a)ccurate or not,” it “has intensified the longstanding fight over abortion and turned it into a high-tech propaganda war.”
Seven paragraphs later, still at it, Genzlinger wrote regarding the child’s “silent scream”: “Abortion rights advocates and some medical experts called the scene manipulative, explaining that a 12-week-old fetus does not have a brain or developed neural pathways and therefore, they argued, cannot experience pain.”
Although a fetus doesn’t have an adult’s brain, the little baby certainly has far more of a working brain than the brainless and unscientific goof Genzlinger, pathetically unable to find one neutral source to quote who disagreed with his goose-stepping Times propaganda.
Coincidentally, the day after Donald Smith’s death, the January 31 issue of the leftist Minneapolis Star-Tribune had a feature story at the bottom of the news page B-1 about the local Planned Parenthood planning for an expanded office.
There was not a single word in reporter Miguel Otarola’s story about the organization being considered controversial in the least, although it’s widely recognized as a massive, tax-eating abortion provider.
The second paragraph of the 14-paragraph story described PP, in the reporter’s own words, as being a “health care provider.” The seventh paragraph quoted a PP communications director gushing, “We’re hoping to really make this a very modern, very fresh place that patients are going to feel very welcome in.”
The eighth paragraph said its third floor “will house an education and outreach team, which will go out to colleges and high schools.”
Not until the ninth paragraph was abortion even mentioned, and then only in the context of a service to be available.
The eleventh paragraph quoted a neighborhood association as applauding PP’s efforts.
From this story, one might think that baby-slaughtering PP does nothing more controversial than dispense healthy fruit juices. An East Coast journalist who mailed me this news page commented, “Like the old hack rewrites in real-estate sections.”
From New York to Minneapolis to Los Angeles, pro-lifers and other U.S. traditionalists have learned to expect dominating blindness and bigotry ruling in so-called newsrooms. The Washington Post’s hilariously self-congratulatory “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto would far more accurately say, “Truth Dies in Democratic Party Newsrooms.”
While dominant-media staff bleat about not getting enough respect, they’re like the very naughty scamp who complains that Mommy has no right to discipline him although his face is smeared with forbidden sweets and his pockets jangle with stolen coins.
We have long learned to place no faith in these media’s trashy deceptions and conniving corruption. They can only blame themselves if many people think the media’s devil-figure Donald Trump is at least as likely, if not much more so, to deliver the truth.
As only the latest scandal in dominant media’s shameful cover-up record, the nation suddenly discovered the Democrat Party’s lust to impose fourth-trimester abortion on innocent, defenseless babies. But why not? Pro-abortion media have coddled and cooed for decades not over the babies but over their killers.
The newsroom view is that Dems can do no wrong, so each outrage only invites a further one. One might think that media finally had reached the point of having to feel ashamed when U.S. Senate Democrats blocked the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act on February 25. But no. Dominant media yet again covered up for and excused the horror.
Brent Bozell and Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center wrote that “44 Democrats voted in favor of infanticide, including seven presidential aspirants — Senators Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.”
However, Bozell and Graham wrote, “What was network TV coverage of this vote in the first 24 hours? Zero on ABC, CBS and NBC. Hours after, Sanders appeared in an hourlong ‘town hall’ on CNN and did not get a single question on this. Warren was interviewed by Chris Hayes on MSNBC for 11 minutes and no question.”
These media’s aversion to the wide world of reality doesn’t mean there’s nothing worthwhile going on out there, though.
Phoenix radio talk host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) told his listeners on February 22 that when he joined other black conservatives at the White House the previous day for a greeting by Trump, there was considerable discussion by them on the damage caused by having liquor stores and Planned Parenthood offices on every block in poorer neighborhoods.
That’s another rumble indicating that folks are getting restive on the leftists’ plantations.
An Amazing Weekend
Meanwhile, members of another group taken for granted by establishment power brokers, young Latinos, met in Phoenix from February 22 through 24 for the Young Latino Leadership Summit organized by a conservative activist group for young people, Turning Point USA (tpusa.com).
A TPUSA news release issued before the conference said: “Throughout the summit, attendees will hear from some of the nation’s most well-known conservative and Hispanic leaders, receive professional development and leadership training, while networking with hundreds of other attendees and organizations from all across the country.”
Once it concluded, a spokesman told The Wanderer: “We had approximately 300 students in attendance, 22 states represented. Speech topics included how to become an entrepreneur, immigration and border security, LEXIT (Latino Exit from the Democratic Party), and gun rights.”
One young woman who attended, Michelle Gamboa, tweeted:
“It was an amazing weekend! I learned a lot more and gained new insight and perspective! Thank you all so much for such an amazing event. It was incredible. I’ve met lots of amazing people and hope we can all leave knowing how to better articulate our messaging in order to reach more Latinos and other minorities. It’s important to show compassion to make a change!”
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