What’s missing from CBS’ March for Life slides?

January 26, 2012 By

The online producers at CBS posted a photo slideshow the other day that appeared under the following rather literal headline:

Activists Hold Annual March For Life On Roe v. Wade Anniversary

So, just thinking out loud, what percentage of the pictures in this gallery would you expect to be of, well, the thousands and thousands of activists who traveled to Washington, D.C., in order to take part in the annual March For Life on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade?

If you guessed anything other than zero, you would be wrong.

There are literally no pictures of any pro-lifers in this feature.

Instead, the entire slideshow consists of images such as the one embedded below. Really, go click through it, if you don’t believe me. (UPDATE: Around 7:00 PM on January 26, photos of pro-lifers were added to the gallery.)

Now, it is true that each year at the March For Life, you can count on seeing a handful of pro-abortion-rights protesters. Usually around a half dozen to two dozen.

The March for Life, on the other hand, features many more. How many more? Well, I imagine that the estimate put out by organizers of half a million is an overstatement, but you get the idea. Perhaps you can take a gander at this picture of this year’s (frigid, rain-soaked) march here that CBS was unable to get. One Mass — alone — at the National Shrine had an official attendance of 17,851. So basically about the same number on both sides, right?

No joke. Pro-lifers might recall the 2010 incident when CNN surmised that there might be more pro-choice activists at the annual March for Life than opponents of abortion. I’m not exaggerating. CNN’s Rick Sanchez stated that “there are both sides being represented” and then asked his producer, “Which side is represented the most Angie, do we know?” He didn’t get an answer and, thus, he went on to promise that CNN would “keep an eye” on the situation and report on the matter “fairly and squarely.”

When I noted in a recent post that the New York Times, which is normally accused of over-reporting on other protests, had failed to cover the march (again) and that the Washington Post was using weird language to describe Catholic doctrine on life issues, a commenter wrote:

It’s the third week of January so it must be time for the annual GR bashing of the MSM “coverage” of the annual “March for Life”.

Yep! You got it. It must be about that time. It’s really amazing, isn’t it, that we don’t fall all ourselves with praise for a media culture that ignores this large event.

Now, thankfully you can get the news from other sources, thanks to the wonders of social media. But should you have to? Of course not.

So what gives? Why do the media fail at this so consistently, year after year after year? What is it? Pro-life writer Elizabeth Scalia has some thoughts:

Unfortunately, the “big picture” is hard to come by, particularly if you’re looking for “big pictures” of this well-attended march. We have reached a remarkable era of photojournalism, as demonstrated by the once-noble Washington Post — one where a half million people can march, the headlines can call it “thousands” and the pictures show you none of it.

Someone asked me on Twitter, “why don’t they just report the truth” and I thought, “because they have given themselves wholly over to a lie, and they fear the truth. Having built up the lie for so long that it’s become their foundation, they know they cannot withstand an assault by the truth.”

So they have become truth-phobics, our mainstream media. They can’t tell you the truth about anything, anymore — they can only do whatever it takes to sustain the narratives they’ve constructed. …

You want the truth? You think you deserve it? The press can’t handle the truth; they can’t bring it to you. The New York Times just ignores inconvenient truth, entirely.

That’s why 250 people camping out in a park gets thousands of stories, while half-a-million marching on Washington does not get reported at all, or if it does, the pictures are cropped; the attendees are caricatured, mis-named and under-represented while their opponents are over-represented.

Scalia is writing from a particular point of view, obviously. But what do you think? Why do we see such problems year after year? What’s going on? What can be done to help reporters do a better job? In the case of CBS, for instance, maybe a pro-life marcher could have simply tapped the photographer on the shoulder and told him to look behind himself at the large crowds marching by the Supreme Court for hours on Monday afternoon? Something like that? What else?

Image of actual activists in annual March For Life via Telecare. And h/t to Vestal Morons.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Evangelicals, Journalism, Politics, Social Issues
  • Riana P

    Well, it’s like you say, here at GR. The press just doesn’t get religion, and they think this is a religious issue, just as they’re painting Obama’s assault on conscience as a religious issue.

  • Ellen

    I’m sure the photographer had plenty of crowd shots. News photographers take dozens, if not hundreds of photos of events they are assigned to. The question is, who decided to post only those counter protestor pictures? That is where the bias is; in the editing and choosing.

  • Julia

    The photo gallery was startling.

    Ellen must be right about the editor who chose the photos to be presented. Incredible.

  • michael henry

    “Now, thankfully you can get the news from other sources, thanks to the wonders of social media. But should you have to? Of course not.”

    I disagree. We simply cannot trust MSM, or nearly any media source to fairly, in a balanced manner give us an honest picture. They prove it time and time again, even after event, year after year. Thank God we have so many sources to go through to get a complete picture.

  • MikeL

    I think Riana is right, the pro-life side is seen as a religious “movement” (can’t think of a better term at the moment, thus the quotes), and mostly an orthodox Catholic religious movement, at the editorial level (to Ellen’s point).

    However, the pro-choice side seems to be seen by the media as a civil rights movement, and so is treated with more weight. I think that’s why two women holding pro-choice placards get top billing over a photo of the hundreds (thousands?) of pro-lifers in the photo above.

    Just my impression, I’d be interested in feedback.

  • Dan

    As a clever comment in the comments to the slide show points out, it is a though the CBS film crew went to North Korea to depict life there and only photographed members of Kim Jong-un’s family driving BMWs and eating caviar.

  • Dan

    As to Ms. Scalia’s comment, I agree that the problem is “buying into a lie” but I don’t think “fear” is the reason that the truth is not reported about the March for Life. The problem is that the press sees the world through an ideological filter that discounts the significance of the pro-life movement and as a result blinds them to the reality of that movement. The press doesn’t fear the pro-life movement. It just can’t see what it does not understand.

  • Mark Tardiff

    I fully agree with what the GR contributors hold up as good journalistic standards. A story like makes me wonder, though, about papers like the NYT: do the editors and journalists who work there even share the same standards as the GR contributors? You can point out their failures until you’re blue in the face, but if they do see any need to strive for objectivity and to hold themselves accountable when they fail (at least when dealing with certain hot button issues), it’s like spitting into the wind.

  • Drew

    What does CBS say?
    I know Romenesko often gets responses from media when he questions them.
    What did CBS say? How do they defend the posting?

  • Mark Baddeley

    The photogallery is simply breathtaking. If I didn’t know better, I would think that CBS was trying to cultivate a reputation for either gross incompetency or partisanship.

    Why these problems persist is, as has been often discussed, a combination of two issues.

    There would be almost no journalists who are convinced pro-lifers in the media rooms of most mainstream news outlets. Not reporters, photographers, or editors. So on issues of this nature journalists are in an echo-chamber and journalists generally don’t do a good job (despite their self-image as seekers for the truth) of coming to grips with ‘the Other’.

    Second, rightly or wrongly, they see that they are writing for people with the same views they hold – those are the core group whose opinion matters among their customers. This isn’t entirely wrong – Sarie (?) noted in the comments on the post on faith being critical to black women that the audience discussing the results asked no questions in an hour about the highly distinctive outcome of religion being very important to a very high percentage of black women.

    People can rail about it all they like, but those are the two issues that need to be addressed for change to occur. People of pro-life conviction (and the rest) need to become respected journalists. Media outlets need to believe that their core group is more than people who share their views.

    The idealist in me would like to say that journalism needs to remember that it is a servant of the truth. But I think that’s being understood in a way that is pushing things towards advocacy journalism. So, enlightened self-interest is the better solution. Journalism needs to understand that it needs people with different convictions to watch it/read it/buy it. Throwing them a bone, like having any photos at all about their march, is just making sure you keep those paychecks coming and don’t have to find a different job one day.

  • James

    The March for Life is not entitled to media coverage, and the media does not owe it anything.

    At this point, it’s really “dog bites man.” It’s the third week of January, a whole bunch of people do the March for Life, and we see a bunch of priests on the DC metro. There’s no news there. There’s really nothing new or novel about “Supporters of criminalization of abortion march again in favor of the criminalization of abortion.”

    If they said or did something shocking, novel, or newsworthy, the media would take notice.

  • Martha

    But it’s not news, Mollie. Hundreds of thousands of people come from all over the country to peaceably assemble, march, then go home without even burning the President in effigy or smashing in the windows of office buildings and shops?

    Don’t they have any idea what makes a good news story? Have they no regard for the print media or, even more so, the television news? What good is good behaviour? Fire, death threats, possible bomb scares, the declaration of the coming theocracy – now that’s what they need to do!

    G.K. Chesterton, probably because he was a jobbing journalist himself, has a more charitable view of the profession:

    “It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.” (from “The Ball and the Cross”)

  • Martha

    James, it is certainly true that no organisation, event or occurence is owed media coverage.

    That being said, what is so novel about “Supporters of legalised abortion protest in favour of keeping abortion legal”? I realise that novelty and newness is what keeps the media in business, but surely it is a daring experiment to represent party A by a photograph of party B?

    I look forward to seeing the CBS slideshow about the Republican candidates campaigns, consisting of “Democrat supporters doing the shopping while Romney visits town (Romney not in picture)” and “Santorum addresses large public meeting (not shown) on same afternoon as dog show – pictured is Muffy, winner in the labradoodle category”.

  • http://www.juliaduin.com Julia Duin

    A note to Mark here: Some people of pro-life conviction have become MSM reporters. They then have lost their jobs when they went to senior editors to protest the biased way the issue was presented. Then the reporter has to decide whether he or she has the legal resources to sue their publication. When this happened to me 22 years ago at the Houston Chronicle, it was 4 years before I could find another full-time job. Other people were also being fired during that era for much the same thing: I can think of 2 cases. One was a TV anchor in Florida and another was a newsroom receptionist in Wisconsin.
    As for CBS, 73 people have posted some pretty unhappy comments next to that photo gallery. The fact that the galley remains unchanged after 4 days tells me that management isn’t too concerned about this issue. Here is their web site: http://washington.cbslocal.com. Don’t go after the photo editor. If anyone has a media directory, maybe they could post contact information for the station manager?

  • Jeff

    There is no hope at all of ever reforming the MSM. Whether through ignorance, incompetence, or outright bias, it turns out a product that is unworthy of patronage by anyone with any integrity. The best that persons of integrity can do is to cease patronizing the products of the MSM and to let the rotten edifice fall in upon itself and then start over by building something better — which would not be hard to do.

  • tmatt

    ELLEN up at No. 2:

    I sense the presence of an incompetent intern.

    Probably, there is a separate but equal slideshow of the actual marchers — it just never got posted.

    Maybe.

  • tmatt

    James at No. 11:

    That hilarious! You’re writing satire, right?

    You’re really not THAT out of it when it comes to basic journalism?

  • Mark Baddeley

    Julia Duin,

    While I didn’t acknowledge it, I figured that was the case. I wasn’t criticising people for not becoming journalists, nor claiming that people hadn’t be sidelined or sacked for being “the Other” in the newsroom. My point was that the problem in the reporting won’t be fixed until there are pro-lifers (etc) in the newsroom who have the respect of their colleagues despite serious differences on important moral and religious questions.

  • Jerry

    James is over the top, but his point is one GR has raised as well: how can someone find a new angle to write about Christmas, for example? I agree with the question but disagree with his conclusion. Any large event, even if a repeated one, should be covered.

    And, of course, it should be covered fairly. My local paper had an article on the event before it happened that seemed pretty good. But they only covered the event itself with a small inside the paper picture. So was that good coverage or not? How should before versus after event coverage be judged? Here’s what I thought was a good “before” story: http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/01/22/chaput-leads-philadelphians-in-annual-march-for-life/

    But the most important point is that people grumble about the left/right bias in the media, but that’s nothing compared to the religious bias as this blog post illustrates. It seems in cases like this like the media are featuring the gnats and ignoring the camels.

  • R9

    An event like this should certainly get an article (and with, erm, photos of the people taking part in it).

    Also tho I’ve seen a few attempts now to compare coverage with that of Occupy. That was a big deal because it was a new movement, showing the world the opposite end of american dissatisfaction with the economysociety, to what we see in the Tea Party (whether it ends up so singificant in the long run remains to be seen). Whereas this is, as has been said, a routine occcurence.

    Also, you can’t directly compare attendance figures between a march and what is meant to be a lengthysustained presence.

  • Bob Smietana

    What can be done to help reporters do a better job?

    It helps for those of us outside DC when local folks tell us they are going to the March.

  • Mark Baddeley

    At this point, it’s really “dog bites man.” It’s the third week of January, a whole bunch of people do the March for Life, and we see a bunch of priests on the DC metro. There’s no news there. There’s really nothing new or novel about “Supporters of criminalization of abortion march again in favor of the criminalization of abortion.”

    If they said or did something shocking, novel, or newsworthy, the media would take notice.

    This is really daft. Here in Australia we have ANZAC day – to remember those who died in battle in defending Australia.

    There’s nothing shocking, novel or “newsworthy” about it. And yet it gets reported on every year. The fact that every year lots of people line up for the parades and the like is news.

    Sydney has the annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and it gets lots of media coverage – and it is predictably the same every year. But lots of people go, which makes it news, genuinely so.

    Possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to march to protest a judicial decision made decades ago (and that’s if you take the view that that is all that is going on) and seeking to have it overturned on the grounds that it is unjust. That sounds newsworthy to me.

    If it was the civil rights movement and they were still protesting a judicial decision from decades in the past that was seen to be decisive in sidelining civil rights in the U.S. and they were pulling in people, especially young people in these numbers, to their annual march on the anniversary of that decision I think it might, just possibly, be considered news.

  • Passing By

    Indeed, annual coverage of parades for Veteran Day, MLK Day, 4th of July are standard fare in the U.S. It’s this parade they ignore or treat with contempt.

    For what it’s worth, I ‘ve read a couple of variations on ”it’s not news” theme, one being that it’s religious, therefore not news. I guess that’s ok, but it sure makes a case for alternative sources of news. The next time you professional journalists hear your colleagues griping about the decline of your profession, here’s the story you can point to. If I am going to pay money, it won’t be for propanda. It won’t be to people who hold me in contempt.

  • http://www.ephesians4-15.blogspot.com/ Randy

    This makes me question the basic assumptions of GetReligion. Taht is that journalists are trying. They are trying to be fair. They are trying to get the story right. Are they? Can anyone look at this and say that? I want to believe that news organizations care about the truth. I want to believe their failures are honest mistakes. But it is hard to swallow. Really hard. Nobody is this stupid. Nobody makes this many honest mistakes of this scale all in the same direction.

    All I can do is cheer for all reporters to get fired. For all newspapers to shut down. For all TV newscasts to be cut to the bone. People keep telling me that this is slowly happening and it is sad. As far as I can tell it is self inflicted and richly deserved. But how can an entire profession lose it’s moral center? There must be some good reporters somewhere. They are just really hard to find.

  • Passing By

    Excuse me while I shift gears : it’s not ”all” by any means. Besides the GetReligionista, there are jounalists like Ann Rodgers, Cathy Grossman, and Bob Smietana, all of whom seem to have been profiled, and sometimes criticized here. Read Mr. Smietana’s linked article and then talk about ”all’ journalists being fired.

  • Liz

    they’ve added pro-life photos in the last 20 minutes or so, the 1st time I looked they weren’t there but now they are

  • MJBubba

    The revised gallery has photos of the pro-life marchers for numbers 1 – 6 and # 14. Photos 7 – 13 show the counter-demonstrators. 50 – 50. From the pictures, you can guess that Mollie is right: there were hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers, and a dozen or two pro-abortion counter-demonstrators.
    My local paper ran a nice article about a local rally sponsored by a local Catholic parish that drew 2,000 people. The article included the note that they had sent a busload of their young people to join the march in Washington.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    I think that it is worth discussing whether pro-life activists aren’t very good at soliciting or developing media coverage, too.

    There are ways you can make events friendlier for the media to cover — which include sharing some great stories with reporters or shaking up the way you do things to create new avenues for coverage.

    I don’t mean this to “blame the victim” here, but I don’t know if people realize how much most groups work with the media on coverage — feeding favorable stories or offering time with a few people who’ve made the trek to DC, etc. You have to do that sometimes if you want coverage or better coverage.

  • Martha

    MJBubba, thanks for the alert. The difference in the “before” and “after” slideshow is really amazing.

    So protesting does work, after all!

  • Clarice

    Ms. Duin, I think your article last year on Metropolitan Jonah is the closest thing to positive publicity that the March for Life has ever gotten in WaPo. :) (I still have my copy!)

  • http://rub-a-dub.blogspot.com mattk

    I think Scalia is write. The NYT and most of the MSM is in league with Satan, but then, so is most of the world.

  • Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

    But Mollie (#28), does that really need to happen? I mean, a half-million people show up in Washington every year and you really need to cultivate media relationships to get that covered? Something’s seriously wrong if that’s the case.

    My guess is that, even if you do work to develop those relationships, it still won’t happen. I don’t think the decisions to exclude its coverage are being made on the editor level, but on the publisher level. So no matter how many relationships you develop, unless you get the publisher and editor-in-chief to agree it should go in, it ain’t gonna happen.

  • Passing By

    It might be helpful to distinguish between national and local level news. Despite being pro-choice and anti-catholic, The Dallas Morning News managed a decent article on the local March for Life. On the other hand, I found nothing on their website about the event in Washinto, D.C.

  • Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

    One other event that was ignored was the 50,000-strong Walk For Life West Coast in San Francisco. California Catholic Daily gives details of the lack of coverage here. Notice at the end the quote from the IndyBay site, which can be found here. The quote: “Reviewing the news coverage on NBC, CBS and ABC SF Bay Area affiliates, the pro-choice rally was given good coverage. The TV newscasters gave their ‘oh, here they come again, yawn’ coverage of the gathering in Civic Center and by now ho-hum march of thousands of dazed looking outsiders.” Confirmation (as if we needed any) of the bias.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    Several comments:

    * The “where’s the fresh angle” comment is actually valid. That’s when it helps to have even one or two people in the newsroom — think intellectual diversity, people — who have A CLUE what is going on with the march and its cause.

    * Many journalists strive to be accurate and to seek balance. Many do not. Hence, this weblog’s essentially pro-journalism stance.

    As I have said hundreds of times: Journalism will be improved by people who love it, not by those who hate it.

  • economista

    The really sad thing about their slideshow (before adding the extra pictures) was that it was of the same 6 people – having their pictures taken by other reporters. Isn’t it obvious to anyone with half a brain what was going on there?

  • Jeff

    People who hate the MSM hate it because they *do* love journalism, not because they *don’t.* It’s the MSM not its critics who seem not to love journalism very much. As with many academics who don’t love the subjects that they teach, and as with many clergy who don’t believe the faiths that they preach, I have to wonder why more people who go into journalism don’t simply go into politics or advocacy, if that’s where their hearts really are.

  • Greg Popcak

    This is why I say that after 39 years of doing the same thing, we need to take a different approach. I suggest that next year, instead of trudging to steps of SCOTUS, we should choose to march to the offices of WaPo or the Washington bureau of some major news organ or another. All 300-500,000 of us should peaceably surround the building, crowd the lobby, empty all the vending machines, occupy the bathrooms, clog the elevators and the stairwells, politely asking the reporters what they’re covering that day and if they’d ever heard of something called “the pro-life movement” and after about an hour or so, leave as quickly and peaceably as we came.

    If Mohammed won’t come to the March for Life…

    (And, btw, I’m not kidding.)

  • http://www.ephesians4-15.blogspot.com/ Randy

    Bob Smietana? I didn’t find the linked article you referred to but I did google him. It seem he does very little for mainstream publications. A bunch for Christian magazines and websites. Is he the best you can do? The best example you can find for why having major news organizations is better than not having them? That is sad.

    I know there must be some good journalists out there. There are some good used car salesmen. There are some good telemarketers. No group of human beings can be all bad. But something is sure broken. More seriously broken that even the Get Religion folks are willing to admit.

    What would happen if all the journalists were fired? The good ones would find an audience online or somewhere. How many would that be? How many actually provide a valuable service and how many are just read because people are in the habit of reading something and this is what the industry serves up?

    It is a bit like the US Mail. They are a lot harder to replace than you think. Partly because many people are slow to adopt technology. Partly because of tradition. People have an idea they are indispensable. But long term they need to produce.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Randy,

    Smietana is an award-winning religion reporter for The Tennessean. Like many reporters, he publishes elsewhere, but that’s beside the point.

  • James

    Only EWTN, and if they really care, C-SPAN carries it. The other news outlets just don’t care.

  • James

    Thanks!

  • Passing By

    Bob Smietana’s story is linked in comment #21, at the words ”local folks”. In case I didn’t say it before, I am a pushover for local religious journalism.

  • Janet Frisco

    On reflecting upon the liberal press and their bias, firing pro-life employees and the one-sided reporting, I start to wonder who owns and controls these stations. The press is a highly effective form of propaganda and has been a tool for groups who seek to control the thoughts and beliefs of the populace throughout modern history.