The major media, however, are evidently busy on other matters and are ill-disposed to call the public's attention to the horrors that routinely occurred in Gosnell's clinic. Molly Hemingway in an excellent piece at Patheos offers a sarcastic but apt description of the media's indifference to the issues involved:
Kermit Gosnell
And what policies could possibly be under discussion with this Gosnell trial? Other than, you know, abortion clinic hiring practices? And enforcement of sanitary conditions? And laws on abortion practices that extend to killing live infants by beheading them? And the killing of their mothers? And state or federal oversight of clinics with records of botched abortions? And pain medication practices? And how to handle the racist practices of some clinics? And how big of a problem this is (don’t tell anyone but another clinic nearby to Gosnell was shut down this week over similar sanitation concerns)? And disposal of babies’ bodies? And discussion of whether it’s cool to snip baby’s spines after they’re born? And how often are abortion clinics inspected anyway? What are the results of inspections? When emergency rooms take in victims of botched abortions, do they report that? How did this clinic go 17 years without an inspection? Gosh, I just can’t think of a single health policy angle here. Can you?Hemingway points out that the media is all too happy to jump on pro-life targets, but an abortionist who commits ghastly crimes is granted media silence.
Just think, in the last year, we saw the media drop any pretense of objectivity and bully the Susan G. Komen Foundation into funding Planned Parenthood. And then we had how many months of coverage focused on someone calling a birth control activist a bad name [a reference to the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke dust-up]? And who can forget every pro-life person in the country being asked to respond to Todd Akin’s stupid remarks about rape?Ed Morrissey adds that we were treated to far more coverage of Michael Vick's mistreatment of dogs than to Kermit Gosnell's grisly murders of live-born infants and some of their mothers as well.
Some reporters justified their inattention by pleading that this was nothing more than a local crime story, and was beneath their pay grade. Of course, the Trayvon Martin shooting was a local crime story, too, but that didn't stop the media from doing everything they could to publicize it.
Photo of the media section of the courtroom taken during the trial
Observing that reporters would have been all over this case had it presented an opportunity to embarrass a republican politician Hemingway tutors reporters on how they might frame the question to get the opinions of liberal politicians like Mr. Obama on the trial:
See, the way you get Presidents and others to talk about uninteresting little local crime stories is that you ask them to.Both Morrissey's and Hemingway's articles are worth taking fifteen minutes to read, and they're powerful indictments of the pathetic state to which our media has fallen. Modern media personnel are not journalists, nor are they reporters. Those occupations are noble and have a certain ethical standard to which their practitioners adhere. The people in the left/liberal media today who arrogate these titles to themselves are not professionals except insofar as they get paid. They're in fact simple hacks, propagandists of the ideological left who see it as their mission not to inform the public but to promote the left/liberal agenda.
I offered this [example] up to Kliff [a WaPo reporter who covers health and abortion issues but who has been AWOL on this one] earlier but I’ll share it widely:
"President Obama worked against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act back in the Illinois Senate. He said he thought it was unnecessary and that he was worried it would undermine Roe. How has the Gosnell case affected his thinking on protections for children such as the ones Gosnell is accused of killing?"Variations of that would work on any and all pro-choice politicians, particularly the ones that share Obama’s extreme views on this topic. Remember how reporters asked every pro-life individual in America (or so it seemed back in October) to respond to Todd Akin’s remarks on rape? Go ahead and ask just a few prominent pro-choice activists and pols for their take on Gosnell. And try to ask some tough questions. No, like real questions.
Showing the public the inhumanity to which that agenda leads by revealing what's going on in our neighborhood abortion clinic is counterproductive. It doesn't help the cause. So it gets ignored.
If you think this is a bit too critical ask yourself two questions: Had you heard of Kermit Gosnell before reading this post? Do you think that had Gosnell been shooting babies with automatic weapons instead of snipping their spines with scissors you would have heard of him before now?