They have no agenda and they are nonpartisan. That’s why they’ll spend several news cycles talking about Ann Romney’s horses but not a single front-page article on the murder trials concerning a grotesque fetus-abattoir in Pennsylvania.
I always mention my non-religious libertarian-ness when I blog about stuff like this because it’s become boring to deal with that one person who will assume my problem with the active killing of breathing humans is rooted in religious dogma or a desire to control others, as though those are the only reasons decent people would bother to oppose the killing of helpless humans. Nobody needs religion or a control-freak complex to be repulsed, sickened, and profoundly disturbed by the Kermit Gosnell story, and by the almost-total lack of national news coverage of it.
Even Kirsten Powers, Democrat, is :
. . A child during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?
It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell , there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.
NBC-10 Philadelphia , Stephen Massof, a former Gosnell worker, “described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” One former worker, Adrienne Moton, that Gosnell taught her his “snipping” technique to use on infants born alive.
, who, like , has himself pleaded guilty to serious crimes, testified “It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” Here is the headline the Associated Press put on a story about his testimony that he saw 100 babies born and then snipped: “Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic.”
“Chaos” isn’t really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide.
Planned Parenthood recently claimed that the possibility of infants surviving late-term abortions was “highly unusual.” The Gosnell case suggests otherwise.
Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.
Indeed it is, but there we are.
:
Out of curiosity, I skimmed the last week’s results for “Kermit Gosnell” on Google News to see what turned up among major U.S. media. I found a few articles from local Philadelphia and Delaware outlets, a couple of AP items picked up by ABC, a carried in the Chicago Sun-Times, and…that’s basically it…
I’m left feeling about media bias the way I felt yesterday about dynastic politics: It seems like it’s getting worse, especially their willingness to completely black out “unhelpful” stories or parts of a story rather than simply spin them away…
Have you the details of some of the testimony? I’m not sure you’ll want to.
A Delaware woman who worked for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell recalled hearing one child “screaming” after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure at Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic.
Sherry West, of Bear, said she was loyal to Gosnell – who is now facing multiple counts of murder for allegedly killing children after they were delivered alive at his clinic – but said the incident “really freaked me out.”…
“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” West testified, telling a judge and Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas 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 Gosnell’s clinic.
West said she saw the child, whose face and features were not yet completely formed, lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told a co-worker to call Gosnell about it and fled the room.
Wow, I bet she was so “freaked out” that she quit that job right away and notified the authorities of the live murders going on there. Or, not.
About that testimony, interesting that a 53-year-old woman is unable to describe the sound of a newborn crying except by saying it sounded like an alien. Behold someone so detached from basic human rationality that her psyche requires her to think of the newborn she helped kill as an alien. We all have to sleep at night, I guess.
Also, since when do 18-to-24-inch newborns have “not yet completely formed” faces and features? Isn’t the average size of a newborn 20 inches? . So unless that baby had a severe birth defect, it most certainly had a fully-formed baby face. So, again, this woman is doing psychological acrobatics to protect her own seriously fucked-up psyche, and fine, that’s what people do, but I’m surprised to have seen this bit quoted so many places and not one shred of skepticism about it. A few sites even parroted the line about that particular baby “not even having eyes yet” – but being 18 to 24 inches and capable of “screaming”. Right. See, silly, it isn’t even human.
Another yesterday links to another of testimony that makes you not want to live on Earth anymore:
And Lynda Williams, 44, of Wilmington, said Gosnell taught her how to flip the body of the baby over and snip its neck with a pair of scissors to ensure “fetal demise.”
Williams also testified that she followed Gosnell’s orders one time, when Gosnell was away either running, swimming or working at a clinic in Delaware, and took a baby that was delivered in a toilet and snipped its neck.
“It jumped, the arm,” she said, showing the jury by raising her arm.
Williams told investigators she only snipped a neck the one time, “because it gave me the creeps.”
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I get “the creeps” when I see mosquitoes or when the lights flicker at night and Primo cocks his head in a weird way. I get “the creeps” when a homeless dude looks at me at the train station or when I think about fungus.
But if I were to describe holding a newborn baby’s head in my hands and shoving a pointy pair of scissors through the skin on the back of his neck, through his bony spinal column, until I felt myself chop clean through his spinal cord, “the creeps” is not a phrase that would come to my mind. “Profoundly evil and grotesque” or “the reason I will never sleep at night ever again” or “oh my God, what have I done, I have killed a human” seem somehow more appropriate.
But hey, don’t judge her. She was just following orders.
“I only do what I’m told to do,” she told the jury. “What I was told to do was snip their neck…I never knew it was murder.”
As Ed Morrissey puts it: “I’m sorry, but that excuse wasn’t good enough at Nuremberg for people in a military organization.”
At least the Nuremberg trials got some publicity. We won’t be getting any on this story – even though nobody should be stupid enough to believe the Gosnell clinic was unique – because our betters do not wish it.
As a father of two, this whole story leaves me “pit of my stomach” speechless.
Thank you for posting this. Evidently this is a story which will only get out through individual blogs and people distributing the news samizdat style.
I have been following this story because I am Catholic and read Catholic blogs. The fact that it is just starting to shine through on more ‘mainstream’ (non Catholic) blogs shows how effective this media blackout has been.
I think there are two reasons this story hasn’t been widely covered. Of course there is the bias that the abortion industry must be protected and anything that is contrary to the “brave women’s health advocates” storyline must be silenced. I think the other reason is the very gruesomeness of the story. It is difficult to read what was going on in Gosnell’s office and I imagine it is even harder to write about it.
What really infuriates me is that I know people who have been obsessing about the Jodie Arias trial and think they are well informed court watchers… and have never heard of Kermit Gosnell.
I call bullshit on this. Obama voted three times to NOT criminalize this type of behavior while a State Senator in Illinois. She knows exactly who her ideological brothers and sisters are. It simply helps her sleep better at night to pretend otherwise.
Yeah, I sent the trial proceedings to my sister, wife and mother, along with a strong warning that crying, vomiting, or both might ensue.
Moxie (remember her? she used to blog) is an atheist but she is strongly opposed to abortion because, you know, killing the innocent.
Before this, I only heard about it because I follow Adam Baldwin on Twitter and he posted a picture of the murderers. And that’s pretty much all I’ve got because I’m horrified by this: Williams told investigators she only snipped a neck the one time, “because it gave me the creeps.”
Not because it was murder, or horribly, horribly wrong – but because it gave her the creeps.
“I never knew it was murder.” I don’t believe that for a second. She still had enough conscience left to know what she’d done. Just enough not to do it herself again though, not enough to try to stop it.
That makes me sick and ANGRY. I am furious that the so-called “media” isn’t covering this because they want to cover up what happens in abortions.
I don’t give a good gawddamn who you are and what your religious beliefs are (or lack of them), you should be able to tell evil when you see it.
That this level of evil can be so studiously ignored is in itself nearly as evil. I’m increasingly doubtful we can recover in my lifetime. This world is truly sick.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. It makes me sick to my stomach.
I have NO IDEA how people look at that and say one is okay and one is murder. Does something magical happen after the child leaves the womb? No. It is the same baby so killing it should be murder in both instances.
It sounded like an alien? Seriously? It was a baby crying lady! And the other one didn’t know it was murder?! Really? Stabbing something until it is dead. She didn’t get that was murder?!
And the fact that the media ignores this story? I am speechless.
I can feel my blood pressure hitting the roof right now, so I better stop before my head explodes.
Regardless of whether you are religious or not. I am. And I firmly believe that God will NOT allow a nation to live and prosper that allows this sort of thing to go on.
I weep for my country. But more than anything, I weep for the loss of millions of innocents since 1973.
by their silence, they are proving that they are “not human”. Just power hungry aliens, groveling at the feet of their idol/deity, the fundamental transformation of the United States.
Someone in my twitter feed RT’d Erick Erickson saying this:
I think he’s dead right, unfortunately. Jim Geraghty from National Review is also on a tear posting other “local crimes” that didn’t need national coverage, like JonBenet Ramsey, Son of Sam, Larry Craig, etc., etc.
At least now there is beginning to be a pushback against the Media’s inexcusable oath of silence.
The issue of media bias has become so frustrating to me because OF COURSE it exists. Their blatant shit like ignoring this extremely relevant and sensational story (and a million other topical-yet-inconvenient stories), makes it undeniable. Yet dealing with the reality of the bias is a bit like having to say over and over that gravity exists. It’s just maddening to have to continually acknowledge it. Yet to ignore it and not point it out, seems like conceding–which is not an option.
@Anne with an E: I was aware of this story probably several months before the trial started, but have been boiling mad the last few days. However, while reading Rachel’s description, I kept thinking of Shepherd Book’s “special Hell” and that Jayne would be the perfect person to send Gosnell on the express. Adam Baldwin’s character had a lot of flaws, but Jayne did have a pretty rudimentary understanding of right and wrong – and really, you don’t need much more than a rudimentary (visceral) understanding of morality to know that these acts were off-the-board wrong.
My question is why the hell were these procedures – heinous as they are – being performed when the only person there with a medical license was not even present. So, this Gosnell guy was both amoral and exceedingly irresponsible toward the pregnant woman as well (I almost wrote “mom” or “mother” but decided that was not an apt description of the patient).
Finally, as someone pointed out, Obama voted multiple times in support of what this Gosnell monster was doing. In essence, he was voting to making extra utero abortion on a separately living human legal. The word “disgusting” does sufficiently convey the outrage of voting in such a way. Abhorrent or sick or subhuman may come closer, but my vocabulary does not include the words necessary to describe the people (again, debated over the use of “people”) that would do, support or excuse such barbarity.
This whole story makes me physically ill. And like a lot of horrors out there, this is just the one they caught. How many abortion ‘doctors’ are doing the same thing, day after day after day? I fear for our planet, not just our country.
Yeah, I’ve heard about this, but only because I live in the Philadelphia area and I read blogs.
As someone commented at Ace of Spades, if the 20 Connecticut children had been aborted six years ago, it would have been no biggie.
I didn’t even take the time to read anyone else’s comments because I am overhwhelmed and there are tears in my eyes.
Rachel, you have my deepest gratitude for writing about this. I know you avoid the religious stuff, and I deeply respect that, but truth be told, this is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE and it can’t be mistaken for JUST a religious problem. Yes, I’m kind of all Catholic and pro-life and stuff, and this spawn of Satan needs to be introduced to the mainstream in a BIG WAY.
There is going to be a push tomorrow to try to get the word out in social media and we would all love your help if you would retweet and repost anything you see about the horrors of Kermit Gosnell. Use whatever hashtag you can because I’m hearing that #Gosnell may already be blocked by twitter, f-ing liberals.
Those of us who have been at this for a while tend to get poo-poohed and blocked on facebook and twitter and whatnot, so we need other folks to carry the torch for us, pretty please.
God bless you.
that arises from where a baby is when you kill it — they have decided that a baby isn’t human for YEARS after birth. Apparently being “human” is entirely dependent on one’s ability to discern one’s surroundings and the actions and behaviors and consequences of what happens around one. Not only does this inability make babies non human, it makes many, many people — from those suffering from brain injuries or mental deficiencies, to old people…why…the list goes on and on — non human, too. Take my word for it, as we are pushed toward a single payer healthcare system, we will concurrently see more and more stories about how people who aren’t in complete control of their faculties should be “allowed to die.” How those who are a “drain on resources” should be denied care.
I’ll invoke Godwin’s Law right fucking now, and say that we are heading there fast.
Very glad to hear some passion from you, Scout.
I’m about to burst into tears. Or be sick. Or both.
Gosnell’s lawyer: “It’s an elitist, racist prosecution,” Mr. McMahon said. “This black man is being taken because of who he is and where he works.”
@T Rich
Could not have said it better myself.
This. As I’m reading about some of these people, one of which dropped out of 8th grade and before she started working for this butcher was working for the VA for crying out loud, I wonder even more why this isn’t front page news. Even if they want to sweep the horror of abortion under the rug – we have uneducated, untrained cretins working in medical facilities. Isn’t *that* even “newsworthy”?
@AnnF
Exactly – and I can’t help but wonder if this was happening somewhere else, in some “backward” country, would there be more outrage, more media coverage, more celebrity pet cause concerts?
@Buttercup:
Heading there? I admire your optimistic view that we haven’t arrived yet. My opinion is that we simply haven’t admitted it yet.
Here’s a tangentially related aside. Back about 20 years ago, I was tossing back a few cold ones with a friend in a local establishment and the topic of abortion came, specifically because the whole partial-birth abortion (translation: infanticide via scissors to the brain) came up. I opined that there was no difference between killing the baby while its head was still inside the mother or pulling it out and crushing its skull with a brick. My friend thought that I was being somewhat hysterial and that no one was in favor of that latter position. Now here we are 20 years later with a president who voted against making the brick-head-baby-dead thing illegal, a doctor is on trial for murdering infants for years and a Planned Parenthood representative opines on camera that killing babies post-delivery is okay if the mother is in favor. The response from the press about those things? Either a collective yawn, active suppression of the stories, or both.
There are days when I think that humanity isn’t worth saving and that a giant cleansing meteor is what we really need. Stories like this make me realize that those are my optimistic days.
Beyond the horror of the babies he murdered (and then kept a collection of their little feet in jars), and the women who died during botched abortions, which is why he is on trial, there is the whole issue of his dirty, disgusting clinic.
He used not just unsterilized tools and equipment, but the whole place was caked, smeared, and dripping with the blood, fluid, and tissue of previous victims–and their germs and infections, which he freely passed around from victim to victim.
I read the ENTIRE grand jury report when it first came out months ago. That was just the material they had gathered to indict him. I can’t imagine what it’s like sitting in that courtroom now listening to that testimony and all the fresh horrors they’ve unearthed–and neither can the press, because they aren’t there . . .
Please, please everyone find what info you can about this, and share, share, share in all the social media you have available to you. It is the only way anyone will ever know.
I honestly think there is a tie-in between this Gosnell story and The state MUST destroy any last vestige of moral understanding and individual responsibility in people to gain total control. The state is doing that most effectively by freeing people (ostensibly) from the consequences of sexual behavior. This destroys the family. Hell, in many, many cases the “family” never even happens, you have unwed mothers, serial divorces, and abortion. Yeah, us! Talk about your War On Women.
Once the state has destroyed the individual’s innate sense of connection to sex and the bonds it creates between men and women and the children created, it’s game ON. Then we willingly push all responsibility to the loving arms of the “collective”, which doesn’t exist — it’s just the state, soulless, emotionless, always seeking power. If you serve the state, fine. If not, a pair of scissors to the spinal cord, a respirator turned off, a prison cell…I know I’m close to losing it here, but we have allowed ourselves to seek sexual licentiousness to the point where we have no solid moral beliefs as a nation. There are still individuals who do, granted, but the culture has been actively moving us in the direction of “if it feels good do it” for 50 years and now we want the “collective” to take care of the mess. And there it is, sweetly promising how much it will care for us, how it will lovingly pick up the pieces of our stupid, shattered lives. Problem is the state only plays that game until it gains absolute control. Then it’s game over, and we discover that the “collective” is the politburo – and they don’t give any more of a tiny little shit about the individual than we did when we were throwing it away for birth control and abortion.
Here is a about then State Senator Obama and the Born Alive Protection Act.
@Buttercup: The blogger Bookworm analyzed how the Left uses sex to make kids into tools of the state (on par with Islamic control of female sexuality). Sounds nutty, but kinda makes sense: teach children they have no control over their bodies and they’re less like to mind others controlling them:
I couldn’t read the gory details. I know it sounds sentimental, but I went from uncomfortably pro-choice to pro-life after being pregnant. There’s no better way to recognize that it’s not just a clump of cells than to feel a little one as he/she grows inside you. No icky religion needed (though I’m pro-life for those reasons, too). Gosnell and his staff are monsters, straight up.
Glad you’re posting about this…. I’ve been following this story for a while now and it truly just sickens me to no end. I made the mistake of clicking on a link from Drudge a couple weeks ago while I was at work to read about the trial details. The article included a few pictures. I sat here at my desk bawling at what I was reading and seeing. I still see that picture of the baby with his or her neck split open. I read an article this morning about this witness commenting on how one of the babies was so big it’s feet hung over its “shoebox coffin”. How can anyone be pro-life or pro-choice and not be horrified by this?
There were people on Facebook recently berating others because they weren’t changing their profile picture to that marriage equality symbol to show their support for equal rights for gay marriage. I had to say “Google Kermit Gosnell. Read about who he is and what he’s done. Then come back and we’ll talk about who’s more deserving of equal rights.”
As my grandmother used to say, people like Gosnell and his “helpers” will split Hell wide open one day.
So so so very mindbogglingly sick. How people can stab infants with scissors without vomiting is incomprehensible to me.
The whole story is nightmarish. I haven’t words.
@Nex:
Those people get the middle finger from me, although I do try to keep my FB persona as family friendly as possible
@Buttercup: I hate that video. That’s one stupid, ignorant woman (err Professor). Education is probably the most socialized institution we have. We’ve spent huge amounts of money and, except for a few bright points with private schools and magnet schools etc., it’s a total failure from top to bottom. And this damn fool thinks we need more of it.
The collective’s collective IQ must be equal to the stupidest individual divided by the number of members. How anybody can rail against giant banks and corporations and still think giant government is their friend is beyond me. Government’s a tool, lose control of it and it’ll kill you and it won’t care any more than an uncontrolled chainsaw cares that it just cut off your leg.
This story has saddened me so profoundly. Was it anyone else’s thought, when the heard of this screaming child, to want to comfort him or her? Face or no face, he/she was a baby and should have known some human kindness. Sadly, no one human was there.
I wonder why not many people seem to know about this. Oh, yeah, I guess this would be. MSM delenda est.
I’m pro-choice, but this guy was fucking sick. And it makes me wonder how many more aboriton doctors out there are as sick and unscrupulous as this guy and his staff was. Might be good if someone did an investigation (cough, cough, Breitbart, cough).
My husband and I lost our baby daughter at 24 weeks gestation last November. Instead of just having her little body removed, we decided I would give birth to her, so that we could have the experience of seeing her and holding her. When she was finally placed in my hands, I was stunned. Even at 24 weeks, she had a fully human face with perfect, delicate little lips and exquisitely formed fingers and toes. She was in every way recognizably human.
I barely have the will to follow this Gosnell story. Our world was collapsed when we lost our baby girl. My husband and I would have traded our own lives for that of our daughter if we had been given the choice. That someone would deliberately slaughter babies, and in such a heinous manner, is quite literally beyond my imagination. It’s pure evil on a scale I don’t even want to comprehend.
After seeing the empty Media section at the trial I’m thinking that they’re not covering this story because they don’t think killing babies after birth is altogether wrong. Look at what happens with socialized medicine – it leads to limited resources and life & death decisions by the state. Britain’s NHS has implemented their Liverpool Care Pathway where doctors killing seniors and defective babies is OK. The Netherlands has their Groningen Protocol that allows doctors to kill defective babies. They can’t declare Gosnell a murderer because they need to keep their options open for future policies in which doctors are charged with ushering babies (and others) into a speedy, if not as gruesome, death.
@Stickwick: I am so truly sorry.
@Stickwick: I am so so sorry. My heart aches for you and your husband.
@Stickwick:
I know your intention wasn’t to have 20 people responding with their condolences, but that’s who we are.
I am truly sorry for your loss. God Bless you for wanting to experience those moments with your child. I truly believe that every life is precious. Your daughter was alive in your womb and is a member of your family.
I’m extremely pro-life and I honestly can’t fathom any form of abortion–even so-called forms of birth control like the morning after pill which can and IUDs which do prevent implantation. It’s murder, no matter how small.
I very much appreciate the sentiments, even though, as AnnF pointed out, that wasn’t my intention in posting our story. The Gosnell story has been floating around the Internet for at least a year, ever since he was indicted. It was horrifying then. It’s beyond horrifying now.
The media attempt to stuff this down the memory hole — along with everything else that doesn’t fit their narrative — just reinforces how evil they are. BTW, this is a good opportunity to remind folks of Bill Whittle’s excellent video essay on .
Even other abortion providers think Gosnell was sick … and did before this all came out. Because he would do late-term abortions past viability for no reason other than the mother did not want the child, and he wanted the money. Even among that crowd some things are over the line.
Rachel, I think we were separated at birth. Thank you for being able to express my opinions so well.
I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate on this one, in no small part because I’m a big fan of :
I think the reason the story has been strangely quiet on the media until, well, just now is a combination of fear and institutional inertia fed by that fear. The first thing most people do when faced with unfamiliar, unrecognizable, terrible evil – which I think everyone who hears about this story would categorize this under – is they freeze. They flinch. They deny it.
“No way.”
“That’s impossible.”
“They didn’t seriously do that… did they?”
It’s the same thing most people do first when faced with serious tragedy – it’s quite natural, actually. Heck, that was my first response when I initially read about this story. It felt like a circuit breaker deep in my brain shut down and just refused to process it. A day later, I read about it again, and it took a little longer for that breaker to go off… but then it did. A day later, I was finally able to read through the entire story and begin to process it. If you think about how people first learned about the Holocaust, which was unprecedented at the time, and how long it took for people to actually acknowledge that, yeah, that really was happening, wasn’t it, and… HOLY S—T THE NAZIS ARE DOING WHAT?! It took a while. It’s not because people are evil; quite the contrary. If they were, they wouldn’t flinch when faced with unspeakable horror.
My suspicion is that most mainstream journalists, when first encountering this story, had the same reaction. They froze. I mean, they’ve dealt with murder, wars… but piles of dead babies? Murdered by a doctor and his illiterate aides? Using scissors? This… this was unlike anything they’d ever seen before. It was unlike anything they could possibly imagine.
But it wasn’t unlike anything one group of people couldn’t imagine – anti-abortion protesters. In their view, all abortions were similarly evil – this was just a bigger, nastier pile of them. When they heard about this story, they didn’t flinch – in their mind, they had seen all this before. They got mad. They blogged. They demanded attention. Just as Jewish immigrants in America had seen pogroms, had seen hate, had seen some of the consequences of that hate in the early 20th century, and were thus better prepared to face the horrors of the Holocaust head-on than their Gentile neighbors, the anti-abortion crowd knew exactly what they were looking at and what needed to be done.
They skipped denial and went straight to anger. Now everyone else is starting to catch up.
Back to the journalists, there are two things we know about most of them:
1. They’re pro-choice. That’s pretty common in liberal, urban social circles. So, they’re not going to view all abortions as evil, even if they most certainly would view this particular set of “abortions” as abhorrently, reprehensibly evil.
2. They work for large, bureaucratic institutions. You don’t become a major media company without several layers of bureaucracy. It just can’t be done.
3. The institutions they work for are staffed from the same liberal, pro-choice, urban social circles that journalists are staffed from.
So, a journalist finds this story. After a few days of processing, reading, re-reading, and finally coming to grips with the fact that, yes, they really are staring at the face of true evil, they now go to their editor and ask for permission to cover this story. The editor has the same reaction the journalist did – they freeze, they spend a few days, they process, then they talk to their bosses, who in turn freeze, spend a few days processing the story, then passing it on to their bosses because, seriously, this story is huge – we know how to cover murders, we know how to cover wars, we know how to cover natural disasters, but this is a once-in-a-generation story of pure, unadulterated evil here. We have to tread carefully with this story, folks.
Meanwhile, as the liberal, pro-choice institutions slowly, haltingly came to grips with what they’re seeing, the pro-life crowd got to work and broke the story. Now, opinion writers at the major media outlets, who often have more “room for error” and discretionary power than line journalists (they don’t have to worry about checking multiple sources or maintaining “journalistic integrity” – they’re just expressing opinions), are starting to speak up because, over the past week, they’ve finally come to grips with the story and can finally express something beyond pure, paralyzing shock. What they’re saying is the exact same thing the pro-life crowd has been saying – why the hell isn’t everyone that comes in contact with this story filled with righteous anger?
Because they’re in shock. Give them time.
I personally think that, in the next week or two, you’re going to see the mainstream media finally decide, institutionally and collectively as the bosses at the top finally reach the “anger” stage of this story and transmit that to their employees, that they know how to cover this story about as well as they’re going to figure out how to cover this story. Once that happens, this thing is going to be huge – bigger than OJ, bigger than Manson, bigger than any news story in most people’s lifetimes. It’ll be 24 hours, 7 days a week of wall-to-wall coverage of the trial, the Grand Jury investigation, the Health Department – there won’t be a single wrinkle of this story that won’t be over-analyzed into a billion tiny pieces, each one masticated over by talking head after bobbling talking head.
When that happens, we’ll wish the media was still in shock.
@Physics Geek: “Obama voted three times to NOT criminalize this type of behavior while a State Senator in Illinois. She knows exactly who her ideological brothers and sisters are. It simply helps her sleep better at night to pretend otherwise.” I agree. I think maybe part of her bafflement is simply that she’s worried how astonishingly OBVIOUS her fellow press people are being about their bias. It’s perfectly obvious to people like you and me all of the time, but I figure Kirsten figures even the dumbest knobs out there might notice this, and it’s worrying to her.
@Jenn: “Yet dealing with the reality of the bias is a bit like having to say over and over that gravity exists. It’s just maddening to have to continually acknowledge it. Yet to ignore it and not point it out, seems like conceding–which is not an option.” – THIS. A million times over. I’ve got a few friends who know there’s the bias, but they want me to stop mentioning it. Fuck, no. As you said, that would be conceding, and just, no.
@AnnF: I plan to keep writing about it, and about the media treatment of it, because I’m actually outraged for the first time in a long time. The whole thing is horribly, depressingly surreal.
@Buttercup: “I’ll invoke Godwin’s Law right fucking now, and say that we are heading there fast.” I agree. And we’ll both be laughed at for saying so, by people who have either never learned about the first half of the 20th century, or have learned about it and don’t want anyone else to because it would thwart their goals.
@Nex: “I still see that picture of the baby with his or her neck split open. ” Me too. I think people hear the words “they snipped the spinal cord” but they also need to see that picture. See what we’re talking about here. It’s a huge gaping wound on a baby’s back, which you know was made without anesthesia, which is the least worst part of the truth of that image. I can’t even process words to describe it. And yet somehow you and I are the cruel, heartless bastards who don’t want to let women “choose” how to run their own lives.
@Stickwick: I am so sorry that you had to go through that. I know you didn’t tell us for sympathy but my heart cries for you and I want to tell you that.
@Oatworm: I so profoundly, so vehemently disagree with that analysis that I am nearly speechless. It happens! Ha! :)
I won’t go into every detail on which I disagree, because it can be summed up as: there are mountains of evidence that completely contradicts the theory that they’re not covering the story simply because they’re in shock and can’t comprehend the evil. If that were the case, they would not have had an almost literal orgy over the dead bodies of the Newtown children 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from the very moment it happened. If that were the case, they would not have been physically capable of covering, in excruciatingly painful detail, the 9/11 attacks from the moment the first plane hit the first building.
I could go on and on. This story is embargoed not because of any shock or horror on the part of journalists, but because of politics, and that is so obvious that I almost wonder if your devil’s advocate theory is actually a parody. I say that with all affection because I know and like you. But, seriously? You think a bunch of leftist journalists simply can’t comprehend the horror of something their President Boyfriend supports, and that they’ve all known about for a long time, and they’re paralyzed by this horror, yet somehow they weren’t paralyzed by the far greater (in scale) horror of 9/11, or the equally gruesome horror of Newtown?
And does any sane person really, truly believe that if there were a story about a white supremacist group on a “Christian” compound somewhere who were found to be slitting the throats of newborn babies for the last 30 years, that this exact same media would not cover that story like slobbering maniacs?
To ask the question is to answer it. These people partisan assholes and they don’t want all the dummies out there thinking all abortion clinics are like Gosnell’s. It’s that simple. Also, there is a huge race angle to this and they don’t want to touch it. I do not believe for a moment that this story will break huge soon, or ever. If it did, there would be too much attention paid to Obama’s votes to permit this very sort of thing.
@Stickwick: I a so very sorry for your loss.
@Rachel Lucas:
We’d be hearing about it 24/7 on every major news network.
@Libby: YES! Thank you for that link. I read Bookworm often and really like his writing.
What the state also knows is that once they’ve severed the fundamental tie between sexual behavior and moral belief, degrading the sanctity of the individual and the sacredness of privacy and intimacy, you have people who are essentially little more than animals. And the state can then corral us, manage us, work us, harvest us, and slaughter us without so much as a whimper or a struggle from us because we have lost the connection to good and evil, and with it, the outrage and passion which would stand against it.
And we are fully consumed with whether we have free birth control and transgender bathrooms, anyway.
I am as outraged as you. I was glad Kristen Power’s op-ed got the attention that it did. I wanted to say something to the like minded women I work with about it, but it’s the work place. When Kristen’s op-ed came out, I finally asked them if they had heard about it and they had not. I said you know that if someone was doing this to puppies and kittens, this would be the first story for weeks on national news.
I don’t want to see the pictures because I know I won’t be able to unsee them. Just the horrifying description of that poor baby crying out helplessly is an image I can’t erase from my mind.
They are not reporting the story because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Remember, this is a news industry that was very sympathetic to the woman who drowned her children and openly worried about Lacy Peterson’s 8 month old “fetus” being seen as a human baby because, “what would that MEAN for the future of their abortion crusade?”
Here is the NY Times yesterday
Courage on Abortion in Witchita.
Ignore the butcher of West Philly story and write a reminder to people that an abortion doctor was murdered once. It is mind blowing. OK NYTimes, we get it, you don’t care about living, breathing babies murdered, but if you don’t care about that, you supposedly care about “safe, legal” abortions. Gosnell’s clinic was giving women STDs from the filthy unsanitary conditions and women died too. Black women. On top of that, state agencies looked the other way as did the National Federation of Abortion providers who said she has never seen a worse clinic so turned him down for membership, but did NOTHING to shut the place down. There are so many stories here about the failure of so many government agencies, and people to help women (war on women!) to report on.
Blows my mind.
The media blockade is simple to explain, and I think Rachel’s done a fine job, but there’s another facet of their culpability. You see, if they publicize this, they may one day be asked to confront their Liberal politicians the same way they do Republicans, just on the other side of the spectrum, and that just wouldn’t do. The media playbook now goes like this:
1. If a Republican anywhere, running for any office, says something stupid/mysoginist/sexist (and there are myriad examples), every Republican nationwide must be made to address the issue because, of course, guilt by association and philosophy you know.
2. If any Republican utters even a hesitation about state-sanctioned baby murder, the response is, “But what about rape and incest?” That person is immediately asked to justify the very far end of the spectrum, about which people can reasonably disagree. Liberal politicians are never asked to attempt to justify the far end of their spectrum, which Physics Geek aptly described as the brick-head-baby-dead thing.
So, you have national Republicans having to justify something they didn’t even say, whereas the current president has NEVER been asked to justify his own votes to prohibit out-and-out (in every sense of the word) infanticide. If the barbarity evidenced in the Gosnell trial becomes more widely known, enough that the public makes the connection that it’s not only legal (in some places), but that their boyfriend worked actively to keep it legal, they might demand answers. As I said, that just wouldn’t do.
Media bias? Really? How many more people know about the Arias trial in Arizona that this one?