Blackout

There's been an eerie silence in the media concerning one of the biggest news stories of the year, a story that is, at least in terms of jurisprudence, historic. Forty three Catholic dioceses and organizations are suing the Obama administration in federal court over the attempt to force religious institutions to provide contraceptive and abortifacients with all of their health insurance.

Despite this unprecedented, massive legal pressure religious institutions are bringing to bear on the Obama administration there's been scarcely a peep about it in the major media. Brent Bozell of Media Research Center compares the blackout to the Chinese communists withholding news for 20 years that the United States landed on the moon because our achievement reflected poorly on their government.

Here's Bozell:

ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News completely failed to report this historic event! CBS Evening News only dedicated a brief 19 seconds to the story and framed it as a birth control debate. By contrast, ABC led their evening broadcast with the sentencing of the Rutgers student who spied on his gay roommate with a web camera. That story received three minutes and 30 seconds of coverage at the top of the newscast.

This is not a mistake or an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks. This is a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the 'Chosen One' who ABC, CBS and NBC have worked so hard to elect and are now abusing their journalistic influence to reelect. Even when a network like CBS mentions the suit ever-so-briefly, they botch the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit instead of what they know it to be: a religious freedom issue. It's bogus, dishonest ‒ a flat out lie.

The fact is that the Catholic Church has unleashed legal Armageddon on the administration, promising 'we will not comply' with a health law that strips Catholics of their religious liberty. If this isn't 'news' then there's no such thing as news. This should be leading newscasts and the subject of special, in-depth reports. Instead, these networks are sending a clear message to all Americans that the networks will go to any lengths ‒ even censoring from the public an event of this historic magnitude ‒ to prevent the release of any information that will hurt Obama's chances of re-election.

Elizabeth Scalia at The Anchoress largely agrees with Bozell but thinks that the real reason for spiking the story has more to do with fear:

Well, that [Bozell's interpretation] might be the message they are sending. But I think the larger message that perhaps they hadn’t meant to transmit is one of stark terror. Like the kid who hides under the blanket figuring the boogeyman won’t see him, the mainstream media has decided that if they just ignore the 12 lawsuits launched against the Obama administration by 43 Catholic entities, the reality of them will go away; they simply won’t exist, and the Supreme Court won’t see them, either!

Glen Foden also adds his thoughts on the mysterious media silence:

In any case, it's little wonder that no one really trusts the mainstream media to give us an accurate picture of what's going on in the world.