From 2001 through mid-2003, in-between such minor events as 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and the run-up to the war in Iraq, the New York Times ran nearly 100 stories on the Augusta National Golf Club not permitting women to be members.
The Kermit Gosnell trial? Eh, who cares, sniffs the Gray Lady. Or as Twitchy notes, “NYT public editor reviews Gosnell coverage, finds it ‘not insubstantial, ‘pretty typical.’”
Nuts to that says Kirsten Powers; as she tweets, “It’s less than insubstantial: 1 story on trial (1st day) on A-17.”
And she’s right. As of the time of this post, here’s what searching the Times via Google for the words “Kermit Gosnell” brings up for the past month:
As Kevin D. Williamson writes today at NRO, “The week gone by was not a very busy news week:”
The lead item at the New York Times web site as I write is the death of Jonathan Winters. Mr. Winters was a national treasure, to be sure, but nobody is ever going to say, “I’ll never forget where I was when I heard the news about Jonathan Winters.”
There is no context in which the grisly serial murders of a still-uncalculated number of newborns is not news. The horrific case of Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia has been the subject of something very closely resembling an intentional media blackout by a great deal of the major media. When Washington Post writer Sarah Kliff was pressed on her refusal to acknowledge the story, she sniffed that she covers “policy, not local crime.” To which National Review’s Robert VerBruggen replied: “Similarly, national gun-policy people do not cover local crime in places like Aurora or Newtown.” Strange that we all know about such local-yokel crime stories as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which the relatively modest number of seven mobsters lost their lives.
Our country is trying very hard not to think about abortion — about the physical reality of abortion. Earlier this year, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld a ban on the use of what critics insist on calling “graphic images” — but what is in fact simple photography — in abortion protests. Similar attempts to suppress free speech on the subject of abortion crop up regularly. Abortion is a strange issue in that it is the allegedly secular and materialist side of the debate that finds itself taking refuge in metaphysics, in this case the fiction of “personhood” that suddenly descends upon a human being at some point. The other side, thought to be populated mostly by religious cranks, is content to address the physical reality of abortion, the facts that cannot be denied but may be ignored.
But until they were repeatedly shamed on Twitter, the MSM has tried their damnedest. Perhaps they fear their readers’ sensibilities are as delicate as their journalists.
Or perhaps the Times is happy to see as many potential “low-sloping foreheads”out there in the hinterlands as possible be nipped in the bud.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member