Jay Carney on Gosnell: No Comment
Jay Carney on Obama's Stand Against the Born Alive Protection Act: No Comment
Jay Carney on the Duty to Do Something To Save Just One Life: No Comment

Local crime story. Video below the fold.

Meanwhile, the media is protesting it so did not embargo the story, because, well, we covered it once!

Kristen Powers replies that they did in fact embargo it, despite their claims. And in fact they still haven't really covered it-- most of their "coverage" consisted of excuses for not covering it.

It’s remarkable how quickly a story of a trial about decapitated babies and maimed women was overshadowed by liberal rage at Fox News and the “conservative media” who allegedly were hypocrites because they hadn’t been covering it, either. (In fact, Fox News has run 11 stories over the course of the three-week trial, while The New York Times so far has run just one piece, on A-17, the day the trial began.)

I can only think of a handful of times in my eight years as a Fox News contributor that I’ve discussed abortion. The people who obsessively cover it and anything vaguely related to it are those in the mainstream media and in the left-wing media, which is why their silence on this is so remarkable. Mollie Hemingway did yeoman’s work chronicling how faithfully The Washington Post’s health reporter, who covered Todd Aiken, the Susan G. Komen controversy, and the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, didn’t write a single story on the Gosnell trial. No abortion regulation is too small for the mainstream media to cover; no stupid comment about abortion by any Republican goes unnoticed. So her disinterest in this trial is inexplicable.

But while the left has alternately attacked the right for its alleged lack of interest and for paying too much of the “wrong sort” of attention, I haven’t heard a lot about the near silence from the feminist organizations that lecture us endlessly about how they stand for women’s health. I find the claims now that feminists were deeply upset about poor minority women being abused and killed along with their babies a little tough to believe. A search for “Gosnell” on NOW's website yielded only two hits, both from 2011. Search for “Gosnell” on the League of Women Voters website and you will find nothing. The same search on the NARAL and Planned Parenthood sites returned the same number of hits: zero.

But that’s probably Fox News’s fault.

Hard left professor of Being Black Marc Lamont Hill also weighs in. He's the guy who found Chris Dorner's shooting spree "exciting" (or at least understood why people found it such), so he's as left as you'd like.

He's also an academic who doesn't really have to worry about Democrat Party positioning, nor about the media's Corporate Lie about being "neutral." So while he's a lefty, what I'm trying to say is that he's a lefty who's free of any need to fudge the truth on this. He's free to be honest.

And here's how he sees it.

“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.”

Although it's less than clear what the antecedent for "it" is there, I believe "it" stands in for "the media's failure to cover this and our own political commitments to the left."

That is dangerous, he's saying: The union of politics, which is inherently self-serving, manipulative, and dishonest, with the news-gathering function of the media, which is supposed to serve only capital-t Truth and have no other mistress.

But the two have merged seamlessly and copulated shamelessly.

And that is in fact bad, and dangerous, for democracy.

posted by Ace at 05:33 PM

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