Mainstream Media’s Dishonesty About Abortion

Those on social media this morning doubtlessly noticed that #StopAiringTrumpBriefings was trending on Twitter. It’s no surprise, considering Trump’s epic roast of the media in a briefing last week. The hashtag centered around an NY Times opinion piece titled “Stop Airing Trump’s Briefings!” The tagline for the op-ed ironically reads: “The media is allowing disinformation to appear as news.”

The irony in this is that the abortion issue has never been honestly reported on by the mainstream media. Most of what the mainstream media publishes about abortion sounds like it came straight out of the public relations department at Planned Parenthood; and there are times when we are convinced that is exactly what happens.

A Public Unraveling

A perfect example of this happened when the issue of partial birth abortion began to show up on the public’s radar. For years, whenever the press would contact someone from the abortion lobby about partial-birth abortion they would be told that this was a fabrication from the pro-life movement and that no such thing existed. This was the story the American media would dutifully report without question in article after article. However, with the American public starting to take a serious look at whether or not the claims that partial-birth abortion was in fact real, the abortion industry’s lie would soon quickly unravel.

The abortion lobby’s fallback strategy was to claim that these procedures were extraordinarily rare and that no one was doing any type of late-term abortion unless the woman’s life was at stake or the baby was either dying or already dead. They were adamant that D&X procedures were not being used for purely elective abortions.

Their friends in the American press corps was printing out this catalogue of misinformation from the abortion industry daily, without question. But as time went on, every claim made by the abortion lobby eventually unraveled. This culminated when Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers and former Director of Government Relations for the National Abortion Rights Action League, publicly admitted that his side had “lied through its teeth” when testifying to Congress about partial-birth abortion.

After Fitzsimmons stated that partial-birth abortions were not rare – as he and the rest of the abortion lobby had claimed – and that the vast majority of them were being done past 20 weeks on healthy mothers and healthy babies, the media was forced to conclude that they had been lied to by a group of people they had spent decades lying for. Of course, this did not end the media’s pro – abortion bias.

Predictably, the rift between these long-time allies was short-lived and the media soon wandered back onto the abortion lobby’s reservation. But while this exile lasted, one of the most enduring truths about the American media was put on full display. The American media has an unlimited capacity for lying but little tolerance for being lied to. Like the abortion lobby, the American press corps has devolved into a collection of people who dismiss concepts like right and wrong as quaint and irrelevant.

So it is no exaggeration to say that the American media has now decayed to the point that it is little more than mindless entertainment with about the same relationship to real journalism that professional wrestling has to real sports. Anyone who thinks the New York Times or the NBC Nightly News is more believable or operates with more integrity or with higher standards than the National Enquirer, is living in a fantasy world. Only a complete idiot could witness what’s going on in modern American journalism and not see that it has become a joke in and of itself.

Motivations

But this is not entirely due to pro-abortion zealots using their power to advance a political agenda they actually believe in. On the contrary, in our experience, for every journalist with a pro-abortion bias powerful enough to impact his/her work, there are at least ten who are not driven by ideology as much as they are by their own stupidity and laziness. If you think that’s harsh, consider the following.

When covering a story in which those on opposite sides of an issue make contradictory statements, legitimate journalism dictates that the journalist investigate and expose who is lying and who is telling the truth. Today, however, that is not what happens. Modern journalist have adopted the “equal time” doctrine. They are too inept and too lazy to investigate, so they just regurgitate whatever the two sides say and declare that they have been fair to both. The problem is, if statement “A” and statement “Z” cannot both be true, publishing both without exposing who’s lying does nothing more than give as much weight to the lie as it does to the truth. But the media does not investigate because they are either too lazy to do so or because they are afraid to find out who’s lying. When confronted on this, journalists will respond they have a responsibility is to let each side have their say. In their world, this perverted sense of “fairness” trumps the truth every time.

This is complicated by the fact that the pro-choice position is simpler, more easily understood, and frankly takes less space in the article. All that is required is the ability to mindless recite the following mantra: “I don’t think I have the right to tell other people what they can or cannot do.” That’s it! If you can just memorize that, you don’t need to know anything else. In effect, that simple rhetoric keeps you from ever having to defend a practice that you intuitively know is indefensible. To effectively champion the pro-life position requires discussions about biology, medicine, the law, philosophy, theology, ethics, morality, and many other complex issues. In other words, of the two positions, the pro-choice position requires no effort, no thought and no morality, which may explain why it has so much appeal to journalists.

The Result

For most people in the pro-life movement, there is no doubt that if the media had been honest, professional, and responsible in its coverage of the abortion issue, our position would have prevailed years ago. After all, we know from Life Dynamics projects that (a) women are sometimes physically mutilated, psychologically crippled, sexually assaulted or killed during their “safe and legal” abortions, (b) women are being savagely beaten and sometimes murdered for refusing to have abortions, (c) the people who run American abortion clinics are knowingly and routinely protecting adult males who rape and sexually assault underage girls and (d) abortion is being used as an instrument of eugenics and racial genocide. We also know that the media is fully aware of these realities and keeps quiet about them. The result is that the American people have been kept in the dark about the realities of abortion and are tolerating abortion-related atrocities they don’t even know are taking place.

That is why it is crucial that each and every one of us talk about abortion at every chance. The public is never going to see the realities of legalized abortion unless we show it to them. The public is never going to see what the pro-choice movement really looks like unless we show them.

As for the media, we simply have to accept that there is nothing we can do to make the media more intelligent or less lazy. However, it is equally important for us not to see them as more powerful than they actually are or allow their indefensible behavior to impact our psychological well-being. Yes, our enemies own the mainstream media, lock, stock and barrel. But if that fact were going to sink us, it already would have.