Breaking the silence on abortion doctors like Gosnell

April 30, 2013 By 14 Comments

Sometimes other people do such fine GetReligion-esque media criticism that we just like to point at it and then walk away.

So that’s precisely what I’m going to do with Melinda Henneberger’s piece “Are there more abortion doctors like Kermit Gosnell? And do we want to know?” that ran online at the Washington Post. What I like about her criticism is that she puts the best construction on what her journalistic colleagues are doing while also asking hard questions — she combines nice and tough to great effect.

She begins by noting some of the revelations in the new undercover videos released by pro-life activists this week. (Quick note: you know that the Gosnell media scandal changed media coverage even slightly since these videos received some coverage here and here.) Then she wonders why the National Abortion Federation didn’t report some of what it found when it inspected Kermit Gosnell’s unsanitary clinic (“If what she observed — a padlock on an emergency exit in a part of the clinic where women were left alone overnight, for example — was so far outside the norm, then why didn’t it inspire a single phone call to the state, according to the grand jury report?”).

She criticizes media coverage of abortion clinics:

Other such criminal clinics have only made the news as local stories, while most mainstream abortion coverage details threats to abortion rights rather than to women themselves.

Even when a New York woman died after a third-trimester abortion performed in Maryland in February, the coverage questioned not the care that led to her death, but the breach of privacy she suffered when antiabortion activists publicized the case.

Henneberger notes that there is an egregious double standard:

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From Reuters: Another by-the-book Womenpriests story

April 30, 2013 By 19 Comments
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At this point, it seems that mainstream journalists have decided that the Womenpriests movement deserves a slow-rolling wave of coverage in which (a) it will clear that the women are operating outside the official borders of the Roman Catholic Church, but (b) the viewpoints of movement leaders will be quoted as gospel truth when it comes time to discuss why the nasty male church leaders believe what they believe.

For most reporters, appears that this is now a story in which only one side needs to be approached for in-depth quotes.

Yes, there is also a possibility that Catholic officials have decided to refuse all interview requests. However, I am convinced that if this was the case, journalists would be telling us that (with the standard, “A spokesperson for Archbishop Nasty Male declined comment when asked about the courageous work of the brave women who are willing to listen to the voice of Christ Sophia”).

The other day, I took a look some of the pre-event coverage of the ordination of Rosemarie Smead in Louisville, Ky. Now, Reuters has produced a story on the ordination rite itself that is a five-star classic of the genre.

Let’s walk through the top of this story:

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (Reuters) – In an emotional ceremony filled with tears and applause, a 70-year-old Kentucky woman was ordained a priest on Saturday as part of a dissident group operating outside of official Roman Catholic Church authority.

Where did this rite take place? In a liberal Protestant Church. Readers have to dig pretty deep into the story to find that out.

Rosemarie Smead is one of about 150 women around the world who have decided not to wait for the Roman Catholic Church to lift its ban on women priests, but to be ordained and start their own congregations.

Another interesting feature of this report: The Reuters team somehow managed to avoid using the actual name of the movement behind the event — Womenpriests. The implication is that these are dissident Catholic churches, not fledgling parishes in a separate movement. This is implied, of course, in the lede with the “operating outside of official Roman Catholic Church authority” language. But why not use the actual name of this schismatic movement?

Later on, readers are told:

The ordination of women as priests, along with the issues of married priests and birth control, represents one of the big divides between U.S. Catholics and the Vatican hierarchy. Seventy percent of U.S. Catholics believe that women should be allowed to be priests, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this year.

And who are these “American Catholics”? Might they be Catholics on the fringe of the church? The key number, of course, would be the number of PRACTICING American Catholics who are in favor of changing church doctrines on the priesthood. They are out there, but much smaller in number.

Now it is time, as usual, to quote several pieces of paper representing the views of the church establishment:

The former pope, Benedict XVI, reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings. Male priests have been stripped of their holy orders for participating in ordination ceremonies for women.

In a statement last week, Louisville Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz called the planned ceremony by the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests a “simulated ordination” in opposition to Catholic teaching.

“The simulation of a sacrament carries very serious penal sanctions in Church law, and Catholics should not support or participate in Saturday’s event,” Kurtz said.

And what about this church traditions involved in this issue? What does church history say?

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Does journalism matter?

April 29, 2013 By 11 Comments

Does journalism matter? Not as much as it once did – if audience numbers or circulation rates are any guide.

The influence and authority of the nightly network news and the morning metropolitan daily is on the ebb. They like the sea of faith were once, too, at the full, round earth’s shore and lay like the folds of the bright girdle furled. But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world — sorry, can’t help myself when I get that Arnoldian urge.

Perhaps journalism is going the way of poetry?  In 1992, Dana Gioia, (who would later become the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts), wrote an essay entitled “Can Poetry Matter?”.   Unlike fiction­, poetry no longer mattered, and had become the specialized calling of a small and isolated group, he argued. Five years later, the novelist Jonathan Franzen made the same complaint about fiction, deploring the neglect of novels in favor of movies and the web. Journalism — as practiced by the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, the BBC and the American networks — suffers from the ills of poetry and fiction — domination by a priestly caste whose views are formed by a closed world shaped by secularist materialist political-left pieties and an increasingly outmoded publishing platform.

Host Todd Wilkin of the Issues, Etc. show of Lutheran Public Radio and I discussed these questions on 25 April 2013 in the context of my GetReligion articles “Gosnell fog blankets Britain” and “Master of my domain”. We began the show with an overview of the British press coverage (none to speak of save in the op-ed columns of the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, which has written more about this story than any non-Philadelphia paper.) I did give Todd an update on the Guardian, noting that on 19 April one of its loonier left Comment is Free contributors explained to the comrades of Islington:

Now the [Gosnell] trial is underway, and anti-abortion activists are insisting there’s been a cover-up by ideologues intent on averting honest discussion about the case in order to suit a cynical political agenda.

They’re right. But the ideologues doing the cover-up are on the “pro-life” side.

Yes, its those nasty pro-lifers who are responsible for the news blackout. Go figure.

Todd then moved to a discussion of Diane Winston’s Religion Dispatches article “The Myth of News Media as Secularist Conspiracy”. I observed her arguments were rather thin — blaming the reader for being stupid is never a convincing argument before we turned to the assertion that this was not a religion story.

The Gosnell story is not a religion story, it’s a crime story. People with religious convictions may read their passions into it, but Gosnell did not seem to be motivated one way or the other by a faith commitment. Yet cultural religionists imply that the absence of religious commitment in the nation’s newsrooms—and consequent acceptance of baby-killing, oops abortion, is among the reasons that the Gosnell story was overlooked.

The notion that the news media is a secularist cabal ignoring stories that challenge its shibboleths is wrongheaded.

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Secular-sacred union between Washington state hospitals

April 29, 2013 By 10 Comments

Suffice it to say that your GetReligionistas frequently receive emails that sound something like this:

In the Sunday, April 28, 2013 Seattle Times there is an interesting story on the potential impact of Catholic hospitals taking over public hospitals. … Overall the article is interesting and informative; however, as a former reporter I found it perplexing how the author … slips into what is essentially an advocacy role in the story.

Paragraph four reads: “But over the years, these citizens have paid hard-earned tax money to keep United General Hospital open, and they don’t want religious doctrine espoused by someone else — surely not someone in Rome or even Seattle — to govern their reproductive and end-of-life choices.”

That strikes me as editorializing. …

Actually, this is a close call for me. The key is an editing rule that I try to teach my journalism students every semester.

Consider this journalism question: Must reporters include an attribution phrase with each and every sentence, or even paragraph, that they write? This is an especially tricky issue when reporters offer paraphrased quotes built on multiple interviews, as opposed to direct quotes from one specific individual or document.

I teach students this rule: Never let readers go more than one paragraph without knowing the source of the information. Stated another way: It’s OK to have a paragraph without an attribution clause if its information is clearly connected to information in a previous paragraph that is clearly attributed to a source or a group of sources.

In this case, the story opened by discussing debates in a Washington town called Sedro-Woolley about changes linked to the merger of their small, struggling secular hospital with a multistate Catholic health-care system. In that context, readers are told:

Critics say they’re not anti-Catholic or anti-religion. And they don’t underestimate the hardship and hard work of the dedicated nuns who brought health care to remote logging and mining towns in Washington before it was even a state.

But over the years, these citizens have paid hard-earned tax money to keep United General Hospital open, and they don’t want religious doctrine espoused by someone else — surely not someone in Rome or even Seattle — to govern their reproductive and end-of-life choices.

“When a hierarchy of a religious entity is in charge of the ethics of a hospital, then they are in control — not the members of a community,” says Mary Kay Barbieri, 69, co-chairwoman of People for Healthcare Freedom, which is fighting the proposal.

Well now. For me, what we have here is a questionable attempt to chop one strong summary paragraph — note the connecting “but” in the third sentence — into two punchy paragraphs, perhaps to quicken the pace for readers.

However, in doing this, editors created a strongly opinionated second paragraph that is not clearly linked to that earlier attribution phrase, “Critics say they are not …”

Would our GetReligion reader have reacted negatively if the editors had been more old school and added a few more words to the offending neo-opinion paragraph? What if the story had said: “But over the years, these critics have paid hard-earned tax money to keep United General Hospital open, and they insist that they don’t want religious doctrine espoused by someone else — surely not someone in Rome or even Seattle — to govern their reproductive and end-of-life choices.”

Better? What does the story lose through that tiny addition?

It’s likely that our reader would not have had a negative reaction to that, or if the two paragraphs had been combined with that crucial “but” clause in the middle.

Picky? You bet. But this is an important and loaded topic. There are, to state the obvious, crucial church-state issues involved and the setting is oh, so provocative. As the story later notes:

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‘Take Out the Trash Day’ for Boy Scouts?

April 22, 2013 By 3 Comments

In a memorable episode of “The West Wing,” Press Secretary C.J. Cregg is advised to save a few embarrassing stories for release on Friday.

Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and his assistant, Donna Moss, engage in a somewhat humorous discussion of the strategy involved:

DONNA
What’s “Take Out the Trash Day?”

JOSH
Friday.

DONNA
I mean, what is it?

JOSH
Any stories we have to give the press that we’re not wild about we give all in a lump on Friday.

DONNA
Why do you do it in a lump?

JOSH
Instead of one at a time?

DONNA
I’d think you’d want to spread them out.

JOSH
They’ve got X column inches to fill, right? They’re gonna fill them no matter what.

DONNA
Yes.

JOSH
So if we give them one story, that story’s X column inches.

DONNA
And if we give them five stories?

JOSH
They’re a fifth the size.

DONNA
Why do you do it on Friday?

JOSH
Because no one reads the paper on Saturday.

DONNA
You guys are real populists, aren’t you?

Speaking of “Friday news dumps” …

The Boy Scouts of America made a major policy statement this past Friday concerning admittance of gay members. Of course, most Americans’ attention was focused solely on Boston that day. Intentionally or not, the Boy Scouts’ announcement came at the worst possible time for actually conveying the news.

If you missed the headline, here’s how the Los Angeles Times summarized the news:

Top officials of the Boy Scouts of America have unanimously recommended allowing gay boys into the ranks of one of the nation’s oldest and most traditional youth groups while continuing to exclude homosexual adults as leaders.

Scouting’s executive committee described the proposal as an effort to acknowledge changes in society while respecting the religious organizations that sponsor many Scout troops across the country. It also aims to move the organization beyond a controversy that has rocked its foundation in the last several months.

“We believe the BSA can no longer sacrifice its mission, or the youth served by the movement, by allowing the organization to be consumed by a single, controversial, and unresolved societal issue,” National President Wayne Perry said in a statement.

The recommendation is set for a vote at the Scouts’ 1,400-member national council meeting in May.

Though a dramatic shift from the Scouts’ outright ban on gays, the proposal left many on both sides of the debate unsatisfied. It comes after months of intense pressure inside and outside the organization, whose leadership has sent mixed signals on the issue. On Friday, some who have pushed for change were no happier than those who want to keep the status quo.

Most major news outlets stuck to a similar theme of the proposal generally failing to satisfy both sides. Quotes pulled straight from advocacy groups’ news releases reigned.

While reports hinted at the key religion angle, voices of faith were scarce in the stories I read. The New York Times, for example, referenced “conservative Christians” up high:

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Power to hype or downplay: On Gosnell and the NYTimes

April 20, 2013 By 23 Comments

Many in the media are indicating that they really want to move on from the Gosnell trial that they’ve struggled to cover — or ignored — from the get-go. You’re not seeing much coverage. Earlier this week I came across a small example that demonstrates how media frenzies are fed or squashed. It’s instructive.

Let’s go back to the Winter of 2012. You’ll remember that when a private foundation devoted to fighting breast cancer decided to stop subsidizing the country’s largest abortion provider, all hell broke loose. The media effectively bullied the Komen foundation into reversing its decision under threat of extinction. It led the newscasts. There were unbelievably hostile interviews — praised by media critics — of the breast cancer charity’s founder. The major media got many facts of the case wrong, such as that this decision was “sudden” or that the clinics being funded by the foundation offered mammograms.

OK, so this week, six dozen or so members of Congress signed on to a letter demanding that broadcast networks provide coverage of the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell. Last year, two dozen senators signed a letter urging the Komen foundation to fund Planned Parenthood.

Let’s compare the media coverage of those two letters. ABC News’ had a story on the Komen letter.

The Senate has added to the pressure on the Susan G. Komen foundation.

Twenty-six Democratic senators today sent a letter to Nancy Brinker, the group’s founder and CEO, urging it to reconsider the decision to cut funding from Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings for the poor.

The Washington Post covered it:

The pressure on the Susan G. Komen For The Cure Foundation to reverse its decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings for poor people — a decision which has caused an uproar among women’s groups and on social media — is about to get significantly more intense. Nearly two dozen Senators are set to enter the fray.

The Los Angeles Times had an article. So did the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, CNN, National Journal, The Hill and Reuters.

That’s just what I found on the first page of Google results for Komen+letter+Senators.

So two dozen lawmakers signing a letter about Komen yielded news coverage from major outlets.

And what does six dozen lawmakers going after broadcast networks for failure to cover Gosnell get you?

Hmm. Well, let’s see. I found two blogs, two pro-life media outlets, and the Washington Times. Further digging brought up an item in the Daily Caller and The Hill. None of these are what you’d call major mainstream media and only one of them qualifies as mainstream media period.

Absolutely fascinating, no?

If you want a story to be big, you can keep feeding it. We know that Gosnell is hot news and that folks have been hungry for updates — and largely denied those updates by the media that control what is and what isn’t a story. This letter-from-members-of-Congress story I’m mentioning is just an update. Just a quick and easy item like the Komen letter was. If it was worth writing breathless reports about the Komen letter, why is this one buried?

I get — I really get — that the media want to just move past this story and hope that people forget. For the sake of the media industry’s credibility and for the sake of civil society, it would be better to just begin covering it rather than leave this dark mark on the record.

And a quick aside. I asked on Twitter about where the Gosnell story was from the New York Times‘ excellent media reporter Brian Stelter. A prolific writer, his most recent headlines include “Robin Roberts Update,” “At Fox News, Less Attention Paid to Gun Debate Than Elsewhere,” “A Pulitzer Prize, but Without a Newsroom to Put It In,” and “A Top Producer Leaves ‘Katie’ for CNN.” I was hoping we’d see him focus on broadcast news’ treatment of Gosnell, since his focus is on broadcast media and that’s a big part of the larger story. So, I tweeted:

Where’s @brianstelter’s look at Gosnell media coverage? He’s had days to work on it, no?

I found his reply just fascinating:

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Media’s Gosnell reputation isn’t going to fix itself

April 18, 2013 By 13 Comments

Days after my quest for answers about why the media downplayed abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell’s abortion trial went viral, we have seen approximately eleventy billion media analysis pieces about the coverage. Many folks have written mea culpas copping to pro-choice bias, ignorance, or other journalistic failures. Some folks have tried claiming that the coverage was really there, usually pointing to either 2011 or the day the trial began (a curious approach, given what we know about the time-space continuum). Others have said that since conservative outlets didn’t cover it (except, you know, they did), that excuses the lack of mainstream coverage. Some folks just reacted defensively, yelled at me and called me names. It really ran the gamut.

What we haven’t seen terribly much of, however, is good coverage of the trial, the abortion industry, regulation of said industry or the larger issues in play. The New York Times hasn’t run anything in days, after one particularly weak story that barely mentioned the trial.

Or take the Los Angeles Times. Let’s take a trip through its search engine. When birth control activist Sandra Fluke was called a bad name, did it think that a story worth covering? Yes, big time:

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What about that Komen/Planned Parenthood dust-up? The East Coast media flipped out about the decision by a private breast cancer foundation to stop funding the country’s biggest abortion provider. Did the Los Angeles Times? Yep:

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What about that Missouri Representative, Todd Akin, who said something very stupid about rape? Uh, yeah:

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So before we look at how the trial of Kermit Gosnell has been covered by the paper, let’s look at how the paper has covered another distant case, one that hasn’t even gone to trial yet. The case dealing with the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Oh boy:

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Which brings us to the Times‘ coverage of Kermit Gosnell.

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On Sarah Kliff’s mea culpa on Gosnell (a national story)

April 17, 2013 By 20 Comments

If you have been on Twitter in the past week or so, you probably know that our own M.Z. Hemingway recently wrote a post that noted:

… Since tmatt has me reading the Washington Post every day, to look at how the paper’s health policy reporter was covering Gosnell. I have critiqued many of her stories on the Susan G. Komen Foundation (she wrote quite a bit about that) and the Sandra Fluke controversy (she wrote quite a bit about that) and the Todd Akin controversy (you know where this is going). In fact, a site search for that reporter — who is named Sarah Kliff — and stories Akin and Fluke and Komen — yields more than 80 hits. Guess how many stories she’s done on this abortionist’s mass murder trial.

Did you guess zero? You’d be right.

So I asked her about it. Here’s her response:

Hi Molly — I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention.

Yes. She really, really, really said that.

Well, about 120,000 or so social media interactions later, this journalistic discussion achieved that state that I think young people (as opposed to old people like me) call “going viral.” I think that’s the term. Did I get it right?

A whole lot of water has passed under the bridge since late last week and I have asked Mollie to continue to chart the debates with, as always, our emphasis focusing on people who are trying to promote accurate, balanced coverage of the religious, moral, cultural and scientific issues linked to this trial. In other words, we think the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell is a big, national news story and it really doesn’t matter where one stands on abortion rights, or how often one does or does not go to church, to realize that.

If you have not read it already, and you have a strong stomach, let me recommend in particular the Conor Friedersdorf piece in The Atlantic online that ran with this blast of a two-decker headline:

Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story

The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy.

That piece ended with this journalistic shot over the bow:

To sum up, this story has numerous elements any one of which would normally make it a major story. And setting aside conventions, which are flawed, this ought to be a big story on the merits.

The news value is undeniable.

Why isn’t it being covered more? I’ve got my theories. But rather than offer them at the end of an already lengthy item, I’d like to survey some of the editors and writers making coverage decisions.

Now, Friedersdorf is back with that promised follow-up piece that is simply too complex to discuss in this context, as suggested in his similarly massive headline:

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