Gosnell: It's Come to This at CNN

“Philly-area columnist: CNN journo said ‘small staff’ means he can’t send reporter to cover Gosnell trial,” Twitchy reports:

Unreal.

J.D. Mullane is the Bucks County Courier Times columnist who took the photo of the empty rows of media seating at the Kermit Gosnell trial. His column titled “What I saw at the Gosnell trial” is a must-read.

According to Mullane, someone from CNN called to question the accuracy of his courtroom photo. Mullane’s pitch-perfect response was boom-worthy: “Go to Philly & see.” That’s when he says he was told a “small staff” made sending a reporter impossible.

It took an incredible social media push by online activists to shame the national media into covering the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell. CNN’s Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper devoted segments to the Gosnell trial on Friday. But will CNN have a reporter in the courtroom on Monday?

CNN, which made its bones with live feeds from Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm, and can beam propaganda back from Pyongyang when it wants to, is reduced to claiming that it can’t put a reporter and a cameraman on the Amtrak Acela and send them to Philadelphia to cover the Gosnell trial. Note that CNN is but one component in a globe-girdling corporation with Time magazine — can’t they send a reporter and cameraman with a portable HD camera and provide coverage for CNN? HBO is also part of that conglomerate. I bet they have a cameraman they could loan out on assignment if asked nicely.

Is anyone at CNN still wondering why it’s getting clobbered in the ratings?

Related: “Howard Kurtz Agrees Gosnell Hasn’t Received Enough Coverage, Then Demonstrates Why,” John Sexton writes at the Breitbart.com Conversation group blog:

But just a couple sentences after agreeing the media hasn’t given the story enough attention, Kurtz accidentally revealed why. He says “Kermit Gosnell is on trial for allegedly running a house of horrors, storing all kinds of mutilated fetuses, some of which were brutally killed.” [Emphasis added.]

Fetuses? Gosnell is not on trial for murdering fetuses, he’s on trial for murdering babies (and one adult woman). Here are the first two lines of the grand jury report “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.”

One one hand I’m sure this was just a slip of the tongue, but I think it’s fair to say in this case — the Kermit Gosnell case — the line between fetus and baby is decidedly not a minor rhetorical point.

Let’s hope it really was a slip of tongue, or that Kurtz really isn’t that familiar with the details of the story, and is simply being dragged kicking and screaming by new media into covering a story that ordinarily, he and the rest of CNN wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Because otherwise, Kurtz’s euphemism would be a textbook example of what George Orwell wrote about in “Politics and the English Language,” when he said that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

QED:

From the #Gosnell grand jury report: “After playing with the baby, Williams slit its neck.” punditandpundette.com/2011/01/brief-…

— Pundette (@pundette) April 12, 2013

(Bumped to top.)