More Media Excuses for Ignoring Gosnell Trial

Liberal commentator Kirsten Powers is credited with shaming the national news media into covering the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Begrudgingly, some of the main stream media have given it lip service as a result.

Recently, another liberal pundit, Marc Lamont Hill, confirmed what most already knew: the media is hopelessly enmeshed with the agenda of the left, and that agenda demands that abortion be protected as a “human right.”

Some in the liberal media, however, are defending and excusing their lack of trial coverage by claiming that they covered the case when the grand jury report was first published.

David Weigel of Slate wrote:

Let’s just state the obvious: National political reporters are, by and large, socially liberal. We are more likely to know a gay couple than to know someone who owns an “assault weapon.” We are, generally, pro-choice. Twice, in D.C., I’ve caused a friend to literally leave a conversation and freeze me out for a day or so because I suggested that the Stupak Amendment and the Hyde Amendment made sense. There is a bubble. Horror stories of abortionists are less likely to permeate that bubble than, say, a story about a right-wing pundit attacking an abortionist who then claims to have gotten death threats.

Weigel then proceeded to explain how Slate is the “exception to this rule,” because his colleagues wrote a story about the grand jury report. Weigel admitted, however, that he himself never read the report because he “didn’t see a political story to chase.”

After justifying his outlet’s lack of coverage, Weigel rhetorically asks why some “local stories” become national stories while others do not? His answer: “I don’t know. I do know that a reporter in the bubble is less likely to be compelled by the news of an arrested abortionist.”

Mass murders of innocent babies, aka “viable fetuses,” apparently are not as “compelling” as the murder of children and teachers in a small Connecticut town to the establishment media. Oddly, that local story, which could be used by a Democrat president to attack the Second Amendment, did receive national attention.

Similarly, the killing of a young black man in Florida–an event that could be used to stoke racial divisiveness–also became a nationwide media firestorm. Of Trayvon Martin, Barack Obama could say that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. Of the many innocent victims of Kermit Gosnell, Obama would only say, “No comment.”

Andrew Rosenthal at the New York Times, apparently in “the bubble,” as Weigel put it, scolded pro-life activists for “using” the Gosnell case. He writes:

But the effort to use this case to “prove” that abortion is wrong, is wrongheaded. If anything, the case highlights the need for safe, affordable and available women’s reproductive health care.

Clearly Rosenthal is so much in “the bubble” that he is blind to the reality that his employer has used any number of “local stories” to advance its liberal agenda. He continues, with apparent irritation:

Through this sort of intimidation and through legitimate political action, anti-abortion forces have been alarmingly successful in restricting women’s access to reproductive health services, including birth control, cancer screening and other services. That is the real issue.

Jill Filipovic of The Guardian also excuses the liberal media with the excuse, “Pro-choice and lefty journalists covered Gosnell years ago, when the grand jury report detailing the allegations was initially filed.”

Filipovic, however, apparently didn’t get Marc Lamont Hill’s memo, the one with the no-nonsense admission that the left hasn’t covered Gosnell because it hasn’t served it’s political agenda. She accuses pro-life activists of “a ploy:”

The braying about Gosnell is a ploy to shame the media into covering the issue from the anti-abortion perspective, conflating the illegal procedures performed by Gosnell with safe, legal abortion. That conflation is necessary for the pro-life side to use the media coverage to promote unnecessary regulations of clinics, purposed solely to make abortion less accessible, and advocate for the very things that allowed Gosnell’s clinic to exist in the first place.

Yes, pro-life activists are guilty–guilty of bringing attention to the horrors of murdering innocent children, born and unborn. It’s the kind of guilt you can easily live with.