James Taranto @ The WSJ: (h/t IowaHawk for headline)
The New York Times has finally produced a second news story on the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell–almost a month after its other story, which briefly recapped the trial’s first day. Like the Times’s first story, which we cited in yesterday’s column, this one appears deep inside the paper (on page A12). You almost get the impression the Times doesn’t want to be there. More than almost: The paper’s editors make it explicit with their headline: “Online Furor Draws Press to Abortion Doctor’s Trial.”
What an amazing headline that is. The editors of the New York Times declare that they’re covering the trial under protest, yielding their news judgment to an angry online mob. It’s probably the most honest thing they’ve ever published.
(As an aside, the “online furor” was sparked by a Kirsten Powers op-ed in USA Today. Although USA Today is a website, it is also a newspaper with a circulation of 1.8 million, second only to The Wall Street Journal.)
Meanwhile, the Associated Press, which to its credit has been filing daily dispatches throughout the trial, published an odd human-interest story the other day:
They say they were just doing what the boss trained them to do.
But eight former employees of a run-down West Philadelphia abortion clinic now face prison time for the work they did for Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Three have pleaded guilty to third-degree murder. . . .
In testimony at the capital murder trial this past month, an unlicensed doctor and untrained aides described long, chaotic days at the clinic. They said they performed grueling, often gruesome work for little more than minimum wage, paid by Gosnell under the table.
But for most, it was the best job they could find.
The hard-luck stories include an unlicensed doctor who went to medical school in Grenada and was working as a bartender when Gosnell hired him, a doctor who “relinquished her medical license in 2000 to deal with ‘post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ ” and Gosnell himself, whose history the AP sanitizes by describing him as a “gifted student” who “put his medical school education to work as a 1970s-era champion of drug treatment and legal abortions.”
Apparently the AP reporter didn’t read deep enough into the grand-jury report to learn of the “Mother’s Day Massacre” of 1972. In case you didn’t read deep enough into our yesterday column either, National Review’s Ed Whelan excerpts the relevant part.
