Editor: the blackout is slowly ending, it seems, because of pressure being put on by people horrified at the evil perpetrated by Kermit Gosnell. Here is Alan Cross’ article published yesterday at Downshore Drift.
I wrote about this the other day, but the Media-Bias-Blackout of the Gosnell Abortion/Infanticide case in Philadelphia continues, by and large. Kirsten Powers wrote about it on Wednesday for the USA Today and she asked the questions that every member of the Media who reported on Sandra Fluke, Trayvon Martin, Newtown, Aurora, or any other story that gained national attention should be asking here: Why is the Media silent on the Kermit Gosnell Case?
See the Powers article here: http://m.usatoday.com/article/news/2072577
Mollie Z. Hemingway, writing for Patheos, addressed this story yesterday and convinced me to start directly contacting reporters via Twitter about why they are not covering this case. Here are a couple of her articles:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/getreligion/2013/04/media-on-gosnell-adjust-the-framing/
Many groups are calling for a concerted Twitter barrage on national media outlets today to let them know that they need to be covering this story.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/tweetfest-seeks-to-shame-media-on-gosnell-blackout-93790/
If you have Twitter and have some time, perhaps you will participate in highlighting this story and its implications. The fact that it is being ignored when we are hit everyday with banalities in our media coverage tells us all we need to know about the “truth” that we are getting from the national news media on this and who knows what other issues. Babies were killed – perhaps hundreds of them. This is a major story. It should be told.
Good to see Conor Friedersdorf pick up the story for The Atlantic now. He agrees that this should be front page news and details the horror of this story masterfully:
Conor says,
“For this isn’t solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story. Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn’t make national headlines?
“But it isn’t even solely a story of a rogue clinic that’s awful in all sorts of sensational ways either. Multiple local and state agencies are implicated in an oversight failure that is epic in proportions! If I were a city editor for any Philadelphia newspaper the grand jury report would suggest a dozen major investigative projects I could undertake if I had the staff to support them. And I probably wouldn’t have the staff. But there is so much fodder for additional reporting.
“There is, finally, the fact that abortion, one of the most hotly contested, polarizing debates in the country, is at the center of this case. It arguably informs the abortion debate in any number of ways, and has numerous plausible implications for abortion policy, including the oversight and regulation of clinics, the appropriateness of late-term abortions, the penalties for failing to report abuses, the statute of limitations for killings like those with which Gosnell is charged, whether staff should be legally culpable for the bad behavior of doctors under whom they work…”
A list of some Twitter handles for major news outlets and reporters:
@ezraklein
@ggreenwald
@JoeNBC
@NickKristof
@AnnCurry
@Newsweek
@Slate
@NYTimes
@NPRNews
@HuffingtonPost
@Salon
@WSJ
@WashingtonPost
@FoxNews
@LIFE
@CNN
@DrSanjayGupta
@AndersonCooper
@thenation
@Politico
I encourage you to contact each of these news outlets and reporters and let them know that this story should be covered. Use any of the links above in your tweet.