1) Matt Frost's Unified Theory
This theory accounts for the fact that social
conservatives and progressive feminists both wrote about the story more than
"mainstream" outlets.
For late-term abortion opponents, what more
powerful demonstration of its brutality than an abortionist who severs the
spines of already delivered babies? If you think the culture surrounding
abortion destroys respect for human life, what would bolster your belief more
than the fact that multiple employees willingly assisted Gosnell? And for
progressive feminists, who worry that restricting abortion causes women to seek
out horrific black-market procedures at great risk to their lives, what better
confirmation than hundreds of women paying to receive treatment from a man whose
office was filled with severed baby feet, blood spattered blankets, and cat
feces?
Folks in the mushy middle are there precisely because they're
persuaded by arguments from both sides, but are uncomfortable adopting the final
position of either. This is true on the rare occasions when they think about the
abortion debate. But the Gosnell case doesn't even permit us to think
abstractly. The babies with severed spines and the immigrant woman dead from a
botched abortion are both right there, described by the grand jury report in
brutal detail. It makes sense, if social conservatives and progressive feminists
both think their world views are vindicated by this case, that abortion
"centrists" would find it particularly awful to fully confront.
And for
what? Many centrists aren't sure that whatever position they've calibrated is
correct. They worry advocating for it would make them feel culpable for the
inevitable babies or women hurt as a result. (If the king of a benevolent
monarchy emailed to say that he'd implement in detail whatever abortion policies
I suggested as soon as I wrote back, my first impulse would be to close my
laptop, wrap it in duct tape, motor out to the deepest part of the Pacific and
drop it overboard.)
Writing about this is uncomfortable and unpleasant
for everyone. But if you're confident in the lesson to take from this case and
believe some specific change to abortion policy would definitely improve the
world,
of course you'd feel that covering it is less uncomfortable and
more rewarding. Notably, this theory implies that most mainstream-media
reporters aren't die-hard abortion-rights advocates. If they were, they'd have
reacted like some progressive feminists, proceeding as if this case clearly
demonstrates the need for, say, publicly funded, safer, legal abortions.
Instead, this theory implies that the Gosnell case makes the average journalist
feel conflicted. In my experience, most journalists, like most people,
are deeply conflicted about abortion. Media capitals like New York and
D.C. are also places where being conflicted about expanding abortion rights is
more socially comfortable than being conflicted about restricting them.
2) The Poor, Black Victims Theory This theory holds that
sparse coverage shouldn't surprise us, despite the sensationalistic details of
the Gosnell case, because horrific things happen to poor black people in urban
areas all the time, and the press ignores them. Why should this be different?
This theory is at odds with the counter-theory that the liberal media typically
obsesses over stories about poor, black victims, at least when they're subjected
to blatant racism like the women in the Gosnell case. Sparse coverage, despite
the provocative racial angle, proves a media coverup, according to the
counter-theory.
Setting aside the conclusions, neither premise is
completely wrong.
Horrific things do happen in poor, minority
neighborhoods all the time without anyone in the press (or elsewhere) seeming to
care. Newspapers cover rich neighborhoods better than poor ones, in part because
that's where a disproportionate number of subscribers live. Journalists are
surrounded by educated, comfortably middle-class people. When they get a story
tip from a friend, neighbor, or acquaintance, it is seldom a poor person. Blacks
are underrepresented in newsrooms.
At the same time, direct evidence of
racism sometimes fuels viral stories. If a doctor in Newport Beach gave white
women botox in a sanitary office, but treated black women in a room filled with
blood and cat feces, killing one of them through malpractice, would that be
national news? I think so. It wouldn't have surprised me at all if the racial
angle in the Gosnell case
had made it go viral.
I don't know how
to reconcile a news media that routinely and unapologetically ignores black
kidnap victims while making a fetish of blue-eyed, blond-haired kidnap victims
and that regards racial justice as an editorial imperative that
explicitly shapes numerous stories, except to say that it's complicated. There
are both blind spots that touch on race and class, and a desire among
journalists to be champions of racial and class justice. The results are often
unpredictable.
3) We Treat Newborn Deaths As If They Don't Matter As
Much As Kid Deaths This theory holds that if a pediatrician had
killed seven 5-year-olds at the request of their mothers, it would be the story
of the year. But because the Gosnell's victims were voiceless babies (or because
the culture of abortion makes us think killing babies, however awful, is also
different, or because wanting to kill newborns is more common), his case wasn't
the story of the year.
4) The Covering-Abortion-Is-Miserable
Theory It goes beyond the unpleasantness-of-subject-matter and
personal conflictedness. Writing about abortion, like writing about the
Israel-Palestine conflict, guarantees (a) extreme abuse from readers no matter
where you come down; (b) extreme, tedious scrutiny of every word you write; (c)
certain knowledge that personal friends and family members will find themselves
in strong, emotional disagreement with you; (d) the discouraging impression that
no fact or argument presented will change anyone's mind; (e) the accusation that
you are complicit in something even worse than what Hitler did, or else that you
hate women and want to control their bodies, or both.
There's also the
feeling that, by raising the subject, you're bringing out the very worst in some
people. The way they behave to one another in comments and characterize people
on the other side of the debate over email is unsettling. Perhaps there's a
journalistic analogue of deliberately avoiding abortion at dinner parties, even
ones where political debate is valued and encouraged.
5) The Gag
Order Matters
This theory points out that the judge in the Gosnell
case
imposed
a gag order on all involved. It is almost certainly true that doing so had
some effect on the amount of news generated from the case.
6)
Politicians Drive Political NewsNews items are often pegged to
national politicians speaking out. If Tea Party senators or the Congressional
Black Caucus or President Obama or John McCain and Lindsay Graham had really
wanted to make the Gosnell case a big story, they could have. But no elected
official was behaving in the way that they do when they want to make a piece of
news into a big political story.
7) Journalists Live in a Pro-Choice
BubbleAs
articulated
by Dave Weigel of
Slate, political journalists "are, generally,
pro-choice. Twice, in D.C., I've caused a friend to literally leave a
conversation and freeze me out for a day or so because I suggested that the
Stupak Amendment and the Hyde Amendment made sense. There
is a bubble.
Horror stories of abortionists are less likely to permeate that bubble than,
say, a story about a right-wing pundit attacking an abortionist who then claims
to have gotten death threats ... a reporter in the bubble is less likely to be
compelled by the news of an arrested abortionist."
Says
Erick
Erickson, "networks focus on the things people along the coast are
interested in and not what people along the American river valleys are talking
about. In churches, local restaurants, and small town hair salons a lot of
people across the country are talking about the terrible trial of Kermit Gosnell
in Pennsylvania. It's just not the people who interact with those who produce
the news in New York City."
8) The Media Has a Bias Against Graphic
Descriptions and ImageryAfter I filed my Gosnell story, an editor
sagely added a warning I should've thought to include myself: "
Please note:
This post contains graphic descriptions and imagery." Conveying the reality
of this story demanded words and images more graphic than any newspaper or
magazine typically includes. For that reason, journalists (or producers) who
relied on, say, an Associated Press or
New York Times dispatch
understandably underestimated its newsworthiness. Once producers, editors, and
reporters started reading the grand jury report, as conservative and progressive
bloggers had, they finally realized, "Whoa, the newspaper stories really didn't
do this justice. The most graphic bits in them weren't just cherry-picking the
most sensational parts. If anything, they left out numerous gruesome details and
extremely uncomfortable angles."
Newspapers almost certainly weren't
sanitizing the story just because it was about abortion. They sanitize
everything. Have you ever seen the dead body of a child killed in
American drone strikes? Or what a cafe in Israel looks like after a suicide
bomber attacks? How much blood do you see in the photographs curated by your
local daily from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? If you saw all the wire
photos you'd get a much different impression of modern war. And if the CBS
Evening News aired a Gosnell story while you were eating you'd probably have
turned it off. (That is one reason why dinner-hour news shows don't air certain
gruesome stories.)
9) Pro-Choice Journalists Are Willfully Ignoring
the Story to Avoid Giving an Advantage to Pro-Lifers
Folks
in
the pro-life community earnestly believe this theory. My interactions with
journalists have never given me reason to think that any significant number
would ignore
what they knew to be a newsworthy story for blatantly
political reasons. Admittedly, I've interacted with a small subset of all
journalists, and the very nature of this theory is that it cannot be
definitively proven or disproved. But it seems to me that, for example, David
Shaw's "
Abortion
Bias Seeps Into The News" offers a much more plausible account of how
ideological bias might creep into newsroom behavior. I do not know if his
account was correct in 1990 when published or if it is correct now.
10) Ideological Bias Distorts the Crusades Journalists Are Willing to
Embark Upon
This theory is
advanced
by Ross Douthat in his
New York Times column. As he sees it, outlets that
aspire to "objective" news coverage are pursuing two different goals that are in
tension with one another: on one hand, they try to report and write every story
in a fair, balanced, non-partisan manner; on the other hand, they believe a core
duty of journalists is "fighting for the powerless against the powerful and
leading America toward enlightenment." On culture war issues, "an official
journalistic commitment to neutrality coexists with the obvious ideological
thrust of a thousand specific editorial choices," Douthat writes. "What kinds of
questions are asked of which politicians; which stories get wall-to-wall
coverage and which ones end up buried; which side is portrayed as aggressors and
which side as the aggrieved party, and on and on and on." As the sparse coverage
of the Gosnell trial suggests, he continues, "the problem here isn't that
American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it's that the
press's ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are
willing to entertain."
In comments, a reader retorted, "When it comes to
human rights, there is only one right side. When it comes to women's rights,
which after all are human rights, there is only one right side. When it comes to
abortion, there is only one right side (it's the side that says women are people
and have the right to bodily autonomy). The story of Kermit Gosnell, the
abortion provider you mentioned, isn't about abortion per se. It's about the
lack of access to safe abortion in this country. It's about how substandard
health care *is* the standard in poor areas. But it is NOT about the morality of
abortion." If enough decision-makers in the media agree with that perspective
(an impossible question to answer), coverage of the Gosnell case was affected by
it. Douthat is certainly correct that there is no such thing as strict
neutrality when editorial decisions must be made about what to cover, how much
coverage to extend, and which stories merit efforts to "start a larger
conversation." There aren't clearly articulated, consistent standards for any of
those judgment calls, and I'm not sure that it would be possible to create
them.
11) The Case Doesn't Map onto a Specific Legislative
DebateWriting in
The Daily Beast, Josh Dzieza
argues,
"When Trayvon Martin (to use the
standard comparison) went from local to national story, it was
partly because there was a debate over stand-your-ground laws and whether his
killing constituted murder or self defense. There's no such dispute here. The
question isn't whether what Gosnell is accused of doing should be illegal: he's
on trial because it clearly is. Gosnell could become a useful pro-life bogeyman,
but it's not clear what policies the antiabortion movement would use his case to
push for." Meanwhile, he adds, abortion rights activists are both wary of
passing more abortion clinic regulations (lest access decrease) and mortified by
the regulatory failures that enabled Gosnell.
Perhaps there's something
to the notion that neither side in the abortion debate could use the Gosnell
case as a clear cut argument for passing a specific piece of legislation they're
currently prioritizing. The fact that much of what he did was already illegal
changes the political implications of the case. And political implications often
drive coverage more than a story's importance.
12) Conservatives Are
Engaged in a "Work the Refs" Hustle Kevin Drum
makes
the case by reviewing coverage in
The Washington Times:
On March 18, they ran an AP dispatch about the start of the trial.
Since then, they haven't published a single additional piece. However, they have
published the following:
- March 27: An op-ed by Christopher Harper about the media's
"shameful" silence concerning the Gosnell case.
- April 8: A news story about the "media blackout" of the
Gosnell trial for "political reasons."
- April 11: An editorial deploring the fact that "this grim
story was not something for the morning papers or the evening news, at least not
for those reading the 'mainstream' newspapers or watching ABC, CBS or NBC."
- April 11: A news story reporting that conservative House
members "took to the floor to denounce what they call a 'national media
cover-up' of the sensational case."
- April 12: A news story reporting that "conservatives and other
pro-life advocates who are upset with the lack of coverage of the case are
taking to social media sites in droves."
- April 13: A weekly news recap headlined, "Abortion doctor on
trial, but media not interested."
- April 14: An op-ed about our "undistinguished press corps,"
listing all their recent shortcomings. "Most egregious of all, though, has been
the lack of coverage on the 'House of Horror' trial of abortionist Kermit
Gosnell."
And that brings us to today. Adding it all up, we have a
grand total of one story about the trial itself and seven stories complaining
that other media outlets aren't covering the trial. It's pretty obvious what the
priorities are here.
There are, as I've mentioned, conservative
outlets like
National Review that have always treated the Gosnell story
as if it's important. Certain writers, like Mark Steyn, don't fit Drum's theory.
But there are definitely outlets and writers who gave Gosnell less coverage
than, say, the
New York Times, and are now expressing outrage at the lack
of coverage. Media Matters
accuses the
New York Post of doing this. Said
Paul
Mirengoff in an April 12, 2013 post at
Powerline:
I don't believe we have commented on the murder trial of Pennsylvania
abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. I guess that's because, although some, if not
all, of us at Power Line are pro-life (I haven't taken a full survey), none of
us has the abortion beat. Or maybe it's because we have had nothing of
particular interest to add to the discussion of this gruesome affair, in which a
child screamed after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure, the
spinal cords of babies were snipped, and fetuses "rained" (in the words of one
witness). Power Line does, however, handle the media beat. Therefore, we
should at least note the lack of coverage the Gosnell trial has received.
Movement conservatives spend a lot more time covering "the
media beat" than the abortion beat. Or any other beat, for that matter. Would
this story have attracted more attention sooner if, rather than writing
media-bias columns, conservatives just kept rendering details of the grand jury
report? Hard to say. My account of the grand jury report was widely shared on
social media. And writing it didn't require a travel budget or "mainstream
media" pixie dust. The whole thing is online.
13) Horrific as It Is,
This Case Doesn't Speak to Anything Larger About Abortion
This theory runs through a lot of left-of-center commentary.
Way back in 2011, for example, when William Saletan used the Gosnell case as a
vehicle to discuss late-term abortion generally, a
writer
at
Feministing argued
doing so was inappropriate because
"
If this doctor delivered these infants, live infants that were
breathing and then killed them? Let's make something clear: That is not
abortion."
She continued:
Only 1.5% of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy. And what
do you think the overwhelming majority of those cases are? Women who might die
if they don't have one. Fetuses who wouldn't survive outside of the womb.
Fetuses with such extreme abnormalities that they'd suffer during what would be
a very brief time on this earth. The fact that people assume women actually
want to have an abortion in the third trimester is beyond me -- not to
mention unbelievably offensive to the women who have had to make these very
difficult decisions.
If I can interject here, if you want to
understand why the debate over the media coverage of Gosnell is so polarized,
it's important to remember that some people, like the writer above, emphatically
believe Gosnell is an aberration that says nothing larger about abortion in
America. And other people, like Peter Wehner,
emphatically
believe that what he calls the "lethal logic" employed by Gosnell cannot be
entirely disconnected from policy debate over abortion.
He cites this
exchange in which a lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned
Parenthood Affiliates speaks to Florida legislators:
I'd actually love to see the
Feministing writer and Wehner debate the question.
14) Lots of
Horrific Stories Don't Get Covered
Michael
is a comedian/VO artist/Columnist extraordinaire, who co-wrote an
award-nominated comedy, produces a chapter of Laughing Liberally, wrote
for NY Times Laugh Lines, guest-blogged for Joe Biden, and writes a
column for MSNBC.com affiliated 
