Gosnell's Former Lawyer: It Occurs to Me That a Doctor Charged With Murdering Eight People Would Usually Be Front Page News

CBS ends its own embargo on the story and, in doing so, explicitly mentions its own lateness to it.

Gosnell was the target of multiple complaints to the state medical board, but state officials had not inspected the clinic since 1993. Gosnell, on trial for his life, says he's not guilty.

Walt Hunter has covered the case since 2010 for CBS News' Philadelphia station KYW. "There are images and details of this story that I am never going to be able to wash out of my mind," he said.

Hunter broke the original story, and is now covering the trial, where clinic employees have begun to testify. Hunter said, "You can look at the skyline of Philadelphia and some of the top medical facilities in the country right from the front of that clinic. This was not hidden away."

But outside the state, few have even heard about the allegations against Gosnell because his trial has received little national news coverage. CBS News reported on the story at the time it broke in 2011. Just last week, a column in USA Today accused the media of ignoring the story because of what it called a bias in favor of abortion rights. Those charges went viral on Twitter and were picked up by Republicans in Congress.

"Will the decades-long national news media cover-up of the brutality and the violence of abortion methods ever end?" Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., asked.

Criminal defense attorney William Brennan has been involved in many high-profile trials, and even represented Gosnell until the drug case became a murder case. He said, "A case involving a medical doctor charged with eight counts of murder. It would seem to me that just that fact pattern would make national news."

NBC and ABC continue the full embargo.

The Washington Post has an article denying there's any such thing as bias, or gravity, or The Sun Which Shines. They claim this embargo is easily explained by things like the lack of cameras at the Gosnell trial, which supposedly explains Jodi Arias getting gavel-to-gavel coverage and Gosnell not even a mention.

They also plead ignorance-- they also say they never even heard of this story until last Thursday.

I sort of believe them -- but that's because I know for a fact that these supposedly neutral reporters only read left-leaning news sites and only seek out left-leaning tipsters for news.

Which is bias. How can you claim to cover the country when you're not even keeping current with "respectable" publications like the National Review?

Here are some more reporters lying to you:

The story is on our radar,” said Liz Fischer, a spokeswoman for NBC News. “We understand the importance of the issue and we’ll continue to cover the broader questions as news warrants.” She declined to comment further.

On our radar, but not on our broadcasts or our website. Don't worry, though: We'll report if anything important comes up.

“CBS has been working the story,” said a spokeswoman, Sonya McNair. She declined to explain why CBS hadn’t reported on it until Sunday’s “CBS Evening News.”

I appreciate that CBS broke the embargo but obviously they were not working on a damn thing until this week. Perhaps Crawford pitched the story earlier; if so, she was spiked. CBS itself was not working on anything, except keeping the story off its air.

“We feel our coverage, both online and on television, has been thorough and appropriate,” said Allison Gollust, a CNN spokeswoman.

What? Jake Tapper reported 72 words on the story March 28th. That's thorough?

By the way, the CNN-spawn Headline News has no plans to taint its gavel-to-gavel Arias coverage with any mentions of Gosnell.

An ABC News representative, Julie Townsend, declined comment.

Arrogant, in not even deigning to offer an answer, but then again, they don't lie about it either. ABC is apparently just taking the F*** You Too position on this.

And then there's the clownshow:

Lauren Skowronski, an MSNBC spokeswoman, said her network was paying attention to the story, but added, “We don’t cover criminal trials to the extent of others in cable news.”

Ah yes. MSNBC is too busy doing important elevated journalism to cover such a silly crime story.

posted by Ace at 01:44 PM

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