Matt Philbin @ MRC:
Well that didn’t last long. In fact, it barely happened at all. After a month of ignoring the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist accused of murdering one woman and seven infants, it looked like the media had been shamed into covering the story.
Barely. Even after the most gruesome detail in a trial full of them came out – a baby who survived an abortion “swimming” in a toilet and “trying to get out” – the silence resumed. In fact, the only major news outlet that bothered to report on that testimony was The Chicago Tribune. CNN.com mentioned it, it got no air time.
The Gosnell trial has returned to the obscurity the pro-abortion media hoped all along to preserve.
What coverage there was started on Thursday April 11 when The Washington Post discovered the story (though the Post mainly engaged in media navel-gazing over the lack of coverage, and allowed its executive editor to claim he’d never heard of the trial). CNN began covering it on Friday, April 12, and CBS gave it play on “This Morning” the following Monday. And on Wednesday, April 17, Savannah Guthrie included a question about the case in a long, wide-ranging interview with President Obama.
There endeth the coverage. ABC has never once mentioned Gosnell. CBS hasn’t followed up, and NBC has yet to do any reporting on the story. Yes, the Post is covering it, but in the most antiseptic of ways. On Sunday, April 21, it published a piece titled, “Problems at Pa. abortion clinic point to lack of facilities oversight.”
The article stated that “The catalogue of horrors delineated by prosecutors has raised questions about whether there is adequate inspection and regulation of the 1,800 facilities nationwide that provide abortions.” It quoted no testimony from the trial but contained this howler: “The case has captivated and repulsed a nation where back-alley abortion clinics have become a rarity since 1973.” It’s hard to see how a story that’s gone unreported by all but a few reluctant outlets has captivated anyone.
And as CMI reported from the trial, only 12-15 reporters were covering the court case last week, and another report had The New York Times pulling its reporter shortly after assigning him to the trial.
Granted, the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, April 15, took over the news cycle for the week, and it was followed by the explosion in Waco, Tex., and then the killing of one Boston suspect and the manhunt for another. Also, gun control legislation came up for a vote in the senate. The networks and the larger media rightfully gave those stories careful attention.
But certainly one of the three networks could find time for a trial update on a morning or evening news show sometime during the week? Not with all the other important news the nets were covering.