Media Censorship of Pro-life Rallies Backfiring

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Hundreds of thousands of pro-life demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday, January 22 for the annual March for Life, in protest against the 37th anniversary of legalized abortion. The following day on our nation’s opposite coast, tens of thousands of pro-lifers converged on San Francisco for the 6th Annual Walk for Life West Coast.

However, judging from the "news" coverage of the major television networks and daily papers, these events never occurred. For veteran pro-lifers that is hardly a new phenomena. The blatant liberal-left bias of the MSM (mainstream media —or mudstream media, as many prefer to call it) is rarely so evident as on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down virtually all restrictions on abortion. The same television news anchors and newspaper editorialists who lavish coverage on every press conference and protest by pro-abortion forces, no matter how small, steadfastly refuse to grant any measure of fair or balanced coverage to the millions of Americans who believe the unborn child is a living human being with rights that must be protected.

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As we noted last year, ["Media Censors Huge Pro-Life Event (No Surprise Here!)"], it only takes a handful of leftwing loonies (often only one or two!) — militant homosexual, lesbian, environmentalist, "anti-war", feminist, pro-abortion, pro-illegal alien amnesty, you name it — for the mainstream media to find a supposedly compelling reason to catapult the repetitious non-story into the headlines of the front page or the top of the newscast. The leftwing activists don’t even have to make an effort to be novel or creative, just show up and the sympathetic "mainstream" journos will dutifully find a news "hook" to justify ample, flattering coverage.

The Media Research Center reported on the blatant bias in the failed MSM coverage of the Roe v. Wade anniversary ("ABC, CBS, NBC Skip Pro-Life March; NPR Airs Abortionist Calling Pro-Lifers Terrorists"), noting:

As usual, ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored Friday’s March for Life protest. (Even the Associated Press skipped over the tens of thousands marching.)…

On the [NPR] afternoon talk show Tell Me More, host Michel Martin interviewed Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life. But the pro-life movement was harshly smeared by late-term abortionist Leroy Carhart in an interview that led off that same show.

Likewise, over at CNN, viewers had no way of knowing that the March for Life or Walk for Life events were anywhere near the massive-size demonstrations they actually were. Checking CNN’s "Political Ticker" web page for news for January 22, one can find dozens of stories on all manner of topics, but none that mention the March for Life. However, a thorough dig turns up this brief CNN online story, "Roe v. Wade anniversary marked by vigils, demonstrations," which, incredibly, gives top billing to a photo of five pro-abortion counter-demonstrators at the Supreme Court, rather than the 200,000-300,000 pro-life demonstrators. To add to the absurdity, CNN’s ever clueless and vacuous announcer Rick Sanchez asked on air, "Which side is represented the most, do we know?" — as though the disparity between 5 and 300,000 does not yield an obvious answer!

Even the Fox cable news, the supposedly conservative and nominally pro-life channel, gave short shrift to the pro-life events, giving only a couple minutes of coverage during its news segments and not providing any camera shots that showed the enormous throng of marchers filling the Capitol Mall. Fox did, however, find time to cover many other stories that same day, including extensive and repeated reporting on the rescue of a dog in southern California from the rain-swollen Los Angeles River.

The Times are A’changing … but Not the Times

The New York Times did not totally deep-six the March for Life down the memory hole. After all, as the Media Research Center noted, the Times did mention it — in a portion of a sentence, reporting on January 22 "that abortion rights groups celebrated, and abortion opponents protested, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal."

That’s it. That’s all the Times — which still claims to publish "All the news that’s fit to print" — saw fit to print about a major march in which hundreds of thousands of American citizens participated. But, obviously, the March for Life was not as newsworthy as, say, the march of four illegal aliens campaigning for amnesty, which received generous Times coverage a couple weeks earlier.

Only a few years ago the MSM could get away with such egregious misrepresentations virtually unchallenged. But no more. Thanks to the proliferation of camcorders and independent Web-TV sites, the media fraud is being exposed so regularly and effectively that the MSM not only no longer holds the sway it once did, it is becoming increasingly distrusted, discredited, and irrelevant. Regardless of where one stands in the abortion debate, facts are facts, and the transparent and deliberate disregard for the facts by the mainstream media in this arena is coming back to haunt it.

One of the very effective exposés of the outrageous mainstream-media fraud concerning the 2010 pro-life march in Washington, D.C., is the short documentary "Media Malpractice at March for Life" produced by Thine Eyes.

One of the lamest media commentaries spotlighted in the documentary is a January 22 article entitled, "Who’s Missing at the ‘Roe v. Wade’ Anniversary Demonstrations? Young Women," by Newsweek‘s Krista Gesaman, who asked: "Where are the young, vibrant women supporting their pro-life or pro-choice positions?" She answered her own question: "Likely, they’re at home." Really? If Gesaman had bothered to exercise a modicum of journalistic due diligence, either by going out on the streets of D.C in person, or by merely monitoring the extensive front-to-back live cable television coverage provided by EWTN, she would have found that young women made up a very large portion of huge crowds that formed the March for Life. Young women of high school, college, and post-college age cohorts were swarming all over the nation’s capital, bedecked in pro-life hats and sweaters and carrying pro-life placards and banners. (See photo, above left.) While the pro-abortion militants of the Betty Friedan/Bella Abzug generation are indeed "over the hill," it’s very clear — from the March for Life and similar demonstrations throughout the nation — youth is on the pro-life side.

Those who wish to judge for themselves will have a second opportunity to see the Washington, D.C. March for Life when EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network, available on more than 5,000 cable and satellite networks worldwide) rebroadcasts an encore four-hour program of coverage on Saturday, January 30 (2:00 PM Eastern Time, 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time). In addition, there are many other independent videos available online (see, for example, here, here, and here) that show the massive pro-life gathering and powerfully expose the flagrant censorship and pro-abortion bias of the establishment media.