Calling the News Media to Account

Thank God—and that’s not just a cliché or figurative speech—that alternative news sources exist. The pressure is on the mainstream media, from those alternative sources, to face up to its ideological blinders that have allowed the Kermit Gosnell trial to go unreported. I wrote about this trial last week. Gosnell is the abortionist who regularly carried out late-term abortions, routinely killing babies born alive. His preferred method was cutting their spinal cords.

The outrage over this man should be taking the country by storm. Instead, most Americans are blissfully unaware of this atrocity. Some of that has to do with the average American’s unwillingness to inform himself about what is going on around him. A somewhat eerie parallel exists between modern Americans who look the other way on abortion and Germans during WWII who shut their eyes to the activities in the death camps right next door.

Yet the media has an obligation to inform even when citizens try to avoid being informed. How many mainstream journalists have attended this trial? One picture is worth more than the typical thousand words.

What you see here is the reserved seating area for the media at this trial. This is not a doctored photo. Some media outlets are tripping over themselves offering rationales for why they haven’t covered this. “It’s a local story,” they say. “We don’t have enough reporters,” they explain. Yet these same outlets have no trouble sending reporters to cover any shooter in a school or movie theater. They have no problem following the rehab stints of their favorite celebrities. By the way, Gosnell murdered more innocent people than Adam Lanza or James Holmes. But that’s an inconvenient truth, and it undermines their narrative for the “pro-choice” position. They will let us know what news is worthy of our attention:

The news media—whether print, broadcast, cable, or internet—needs to be called to account for its dereliction of duty. Conservative news sources have been trying to do that. Let’s see if anything changes as the Gosnell trial proceeds.