It’s one thing to be in a movie. But it’s even better to be of such significance that someone plays you in a movie! That has happened to a friend of mine and of my family: the Lutheran journalist Mollie Ziegler Hemingway.
She is played by Cyrina Fiallo.
Cheryl Magness tells all about it in an article for the Lutheran Reporter entitled Reporter in ‘Gosnell’ movie based on LCMS member Mollie Ziegler Hemingway:
One of the key figures in the movie, a journalist who helped bring national attention to the story when it was being ignored by most of the mainstream media, is based in part on real-life journalist and LCMS member Mollie Ziegler Hemingway.
In April 2013, almost a month into the trial, Pennsylvania reporter J.D. Mullane shared a photo on the social media platform Twitter of several rows of empty press seats in the courtroom.
Hemingway was the first person to respond. The daughter of an LCMS pastor, and a member of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Va., she was writing at the time for getreligion.org, covering how the mainstream press reports on religion.
She has since become a senior editor at The Federalist and a regular contributor on the Fox News Channel.
Mullane’s photo quickly went viral, and there ensued a social media firestorm about the ignoring of the trial by the majority of the mainstream press.
In a recent column reflecting on the events of 2013, Mullane gave Hemingway a large part of the credit for drawing attention to the case, describing her as “relentless” in going after “elite journos for being MIA” on reporting the story.
One such journalist was Washington Post health reporter Sarah Kliff, who, in spite of regularly writing about abortion-related news, ignored what was happening in Philadelphia.
As news of the trial began to spread, Hemingway asked Kliff on Twitter why there was no coverage of Gosnell in the Post.
Kliff responded by saying that she didn’t cover “local crime stories.”
Two days later, after receiving widespread condemnation for her comment, Kliff admitted that she had been wrong and wrote a column for the Post that laid out the facts of the case in horrific detail.
Asked today why she thinks the mainstream press didn’t want to cover the Gosnell case, Hemingway said:
“Our culture doesn’t want to grapple with the Gosnell story because we don’t want to confront all the problems that led to him operating his shop of horrors, such as divorcing sex from marriage, dehumanizing the unborn for the sake of convenience, and valuing the lives of immigrants and other groups less than our own.”
[Read it all. . . ]
Have any of you seen the movie? If so, please give us your review.
That last quotation from the real Mollie Hemingway is a powerful statement. There is nothing “liberal” or “progressive” about believing in abortion.
Photo: Mollie Hemingway, from The Federalist
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