Rutgers 41, Gosnell Ø

That’s not a shutout the MSM should be proud of, but a big part of leftwing media bias is bias by omission. And you can’t spell omission without O:

The Rutgers basketball story continues to transfix the media, and why shouldn’t it? Mike Rice, the disgraced former Rutgers basketball coach allegedly killed a woman and at least seven viable, born-alive babies “by plunging scissors into their spinal cords” in his filthy, macabre “house of horrors” abortion clinic.

Oh wait, my mistake. Rice was fired last week from Rutgers over video of him shoving, kicking and yelling at his players, throwing basketballs at them and – most damning – using “homophobic slurs.” That’s made Rice the most notorious villain in America. And in one week it earned him 36 network news stories clocking in at 41 minutes, 26 seconds of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC.

Now, had Rice been accused of killing a woman and eight babies, he’d be enjoying the same anonymity as Kermit Gosnell – provided the killings were carried out in an abortion clinic. Gosnell is the West Philadelphia abortionist who ran an unimaginable charnel house of a “clinic,” for 30 years. Witnesses testified that he may have murdered over 100 babies outside the womb. Gosnell’s trial, underway for weeks, has featured wrenching testimony and horrific details. And it has received exactly zero seconds of airtime on the broadcast networks.

Let’s break it out by network.

ABC

• Rutgers: 8 min., 1 sec
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

CBS

• Rutgers: 14 min., 27 sec.
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

NBC

• Rutgers: 18 min., 58 sec.
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

So why all the zeros? Because the networks are terrified of running a story like this on the Today Show or the 6:30 PM news:

A Delaware woman who worked for Kermit Gosnell testified Tuesday that she was called back to a room at his abortion clinic in Philadelphia where the bodies of aborted babies were kept on a shelf to hear one screaming amid the bodies of aborted babies kept on a shelf…

“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” West said, telling the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge and jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at the Women’s Medical Society clinic…

West, who said she called aborted babies “specimens” because “it was easier to deal with mentally,” said a co-worker had called her back to the room that night because she did not know what to do. West said the baby’s eyes and mouth were not yet completely formed and it was lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told the co-worker to call Gosnell and fled the room…

She later made it clear that she called it “a baby” in her testimony “because that is what it is.”

At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds:

That’s not the first time a clinic worker’s resorted to Orwellian euphemisms to make her “work” more bearable. Ed e-mails to remind me that you’ll also find “Product of Conception” in usage. More on Gosnell from NBC Philadelphia, one of the precious few media outlets covering this story:

An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions.

Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”

The Anchoress notes correctly that, simply for reasons of sensationalism, the media should be all over this story. Dead children, body parts, harrowing testimony on the stand — even the most soulless news editor, untroubled by the horror-movie accusations against Gosnell, should be pushing heavy coverage for selfish reasons, to boost readership. (Britain’s Daily Mail, whose tabloid instincts are unerring, has posted several stories about it.)

Since 2008, the media has repeatedly submerged its instinct to push big stories (I always typed “killer stories,” before realizing how Orwellian such a euphemism would be in this case), in an effort to help the cause. I’ve long mentioned the San Francisco Chronicle burying Obama’s promise to them at the beginning of 2008 that he would bankrupt entire industries, and NBC not losing much sleep that year over his admission to their financial channel that he’s fine with raising gasoline prices, both goals that by their nature would punish lower income voters the worst, and would be examples of heartless cruelty from GOP presidents. (Or Tory prime ministers, for that matter.) Instead, the media altered their thinking on these issues to fit the president’s policies. (See also: The Wright-Free Zone, Funemployment! and ‘The Best-Looking Contraction in U.S. GDP You’ll Ever See.’) But Iraq, Afghanistan and Benghazi sure have dropped off the radar screen, haven’t they, along with Chicago area gun crimes.

Defining Deviancy Down, indeed.