Kermit Gosnell, Liberal Bias in the Media and Conservative Victimhood

This was briefly touched on in another thread, before we were sidelined into debating the more important issues of the most effective swear words and who's feeling picked on, etc... I'm sure we'll get there again in due course, but first can we discuss the whole Gosnell bro-ha-ha, which seems less to do with someone who should have been shut down and arrested years earlier, but wasn't, maybe because his victims were poor and desperate, and more to do with the blame game? Here's an article that sets the manufactured controversy out reasonably well, but is best I've read (and there is a lot) because of the numerous links and supporting documentation.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/04/15/1862301/viewpoint-how-the-conservativ...

I'm always amused by the cries of liberal bias in mainstream media.

Media corporations are big businesses. Like all other big businesses, they are interested in making money. That means covering news that attracts viewers, so the corporation can sell advertising. Although I'm sure that some stories that could be of major interest sometimes get overlooked, a media outlet that consistently refused to run stories that would attract viewers would quickly see a change in personel.

If anything, the media's biases are conservative/right-wing, simply because that's what most businesses end up becoming.

But the data on this is pretty clear. For example, as rounded up by the media watchers at "Get Religion", the following are the search results for various news topics in The Los Angeles Times:

1. Of Sandra Fluke, whom Rush Limbaugh called a slut:

All (50)
Stories (43)
Videos (1)
Galleries (0)
Photos (6)

2. Of the dustup between the Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood:

All (38)
Stories (25)
Videos (5)
Galleries (0)
Photos (8)

3. Of Missouri Rep. Todd Akin's odious comments about "legitimate rape":

All (78)
Stories (64)
Videos (8)
Galleries (0)
Photos (6)

4. Of Trayvon Martin:

All (281)
Stories (165)
Videos (74)
Galleries (4)
Photos (38)

5. Of Dr. Gosnell:

Stories (2) (both of which are opinion/editorial pieces from the last week or two discussing, not the case itself, but the media reaction to it)
Videos (0)
Galleries (0)
Photos (2)

If you can't see the asymmetry in coverage in those numbers, then you are intentionally blinding yourself to the realities of media bias.

If, on the other hand, you believe that the case of Dr. Gosnell only deserves 2% of the coverage given to Trayvon Martin (whose killer's trial has not even begun yet) or 5% of the coverage devoted to Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut, then please explain to me your reasoning.

Why is a loud-mouthed radio host's sexism a vastly more important national topic than gruesomely slaughtered babies, titanic failures in government oversight, and inherent discrimination based on poverty and race?

Finally, I would add a query to this thread's title: "Conservative victimhood".

Who are the victims in this case, except poor Philadelphia women (one of whom died and several others of whom were injured at this abortionist's hands) and the children who were born alive and then killed by having their necks cut in two?

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of racism and death, then why are these Philadelphia women and their children not victims, too?

It is a sad and inhumane thing to ignore the real victims and instead blame this whole thing on "conservative victimhood". Shame on you! Is this what passes for compassion among liberals?

When media outlets criticize the media for not covering something: irony.

#3

The reasoning is simple. Media outlets believed that the stories that they covered the most would generate the greatest amount of viewers/readers, while offending the fewest number of advertisers.

Now, you could certainly argue that the various local/national/international media companies were in error as to the appeal of certain stories; that they over-estimated the appeal of some, while completely overlooking the viewer interest of others.

But what you seem to be saying is that there is a vast, international conspiracy to deliberately underplay certain stories that could potentially generate large amounts of interest (and revenue) solely because of their biases towards certain issues. That none of these highly competitive companies, devoted (as all such companies are) to generating profit, broke ranks to cash in on that appeal, because their biases were so strong as to overcome the demand for profit.

I find this highly implausible.

There is only so much time and space available during a single news day. By necessity, media outlets focus solely on those stories they feel will have the widest appeal to their audience. This is why coverage of drone attacks in Pakistan, Sudan, etc. get little coverage in the United States, and considerably more coverage overseas.

So, it's a not a matter of what stories you (or anyone else) feel 'deserves' greater attention from the media; rather, it's a question of what stories the media feels will generate the greatest amount of revenue.

Mr Campbell, that's the coverage in the conservative commentaria, that's not my view. Using a murderer and his countless victims as an excuse to complain about how poorly served they think they are is unacceptable. Also unacceptable is the relative lack of coverage, which seems to come down to how imperfectly this story plays to both sides in the debate.

On one side, perfectly viable babies were killed and tossed out with less care than unwanted kittens. On the other side, we can clearly see what an illegal back alley abortion clinic looks like -- an argument to keep terminations both highly regulated and available. No woman should have had to go through what these women did, and it certainly points to their desperation. It's also a complex and uncomfortable story in the differing treatment the women received based on skin color and ethnicity. That Gosnell is African American makes this a more difficult topic of conversation. And then there's the economic morass -- that we are happy to live in a country where the poorest of us are given such harsh and abusive options.

The story is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. There's not a single good guy and not a single easy answer or talking point to fall back on. The news sources reported the story but it didn't become big news until it could be shoehorned into the usual pattern of our national discourse.

The victims are the poor women of color who walked into that clinic -- that they reached the point where that was the best of the options they had. While I believe that the issues that surround the decision to have a child are so complex and far-reaching that that decision must be left in the hands of the woman whose life is most directly affected, the idea that a baby that could survive outside of the womb would be killed is appalling.

>6 BruceCoulson:: "Media outlets believed that the stories that they covered the most would generate the greatest amount of viewers/readers, while offending the fewest number of advertisers. ... But what you seem to be saying is that there is a vast, international conspiracy to deliberately underplay certain stories that could potentially generate large amounts of interest (and revenue) solely because of their biases towards certain issues."

What I'm saying is that journalists claim that their job is reporting the news accurately, fairly, and without bias. On the few occasions when they do admit to bias, they admit to being biased towards advocating for social justice -- for example, in the last year or two, many journalists have openly admitted that they do not give "fair and balanced" coverage to gay marriage stories, because they believe that those stories are fundamentally about civil rights rather than traditional morality, and therefore that there is a right and a wrong side to them that they should cover as such. The same thing applies to abortion: as quite a few of the media stories swirling around the Gosnell case have openly admitted, journalists are, by-and-large, pro-choice, and thus they don't usually see a moral reason to cover the downsides of abortion with any type of objectivity or fairness.

Now, you may be right that what journalism really is about is "generating the greatest amount of revenue" -- in which case, all those journalists who claim to be servants of the public are in fact great big liars.

Either way, it don't look too good for journalists.

>7 RidgewayGirl:: "The story is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. There's not a single good guy and not a single easy answer or talking point to fall back on. The news sources reported the story but it didn't become big news until it could be shoehorned into the usual pattern of our national discourse. "

Yet, we frequently see journalists covering other ugly, ugly, ugly sides of American life--the same ugly sides of poverty and racism, for example, that are at play in this case--with an almost ferocious activism.

The problem, as I see it, is that all of that ugliness that liberal activists work to uncover (righteously, I might add) in American life (e.g. poverty and racism) is, in this case, tied up with the one issue that liberal activists think shouldn't be an issue: abortion. So instead of working tirelessly to dig into the ugly side of American life, they ignore it.

Isn't that ignorance precisely what they accuse conservatives of having when it comes to poverty and racism?

The news is out now, so the number of stories generated in the coming weeks will mollify you, Nathaniel. I doubt the story was censored as you seem to be suggesting. I don't know the abortion poll figures, but anti-abortionists remain loud and active, so no newspaper would intentionally lose a chance to sell to them. Plus blood and scandal sell to everyone. So this story was missed, but that hardly means that the media that failed to challenge Bush's lies, and is not failing to challenge Obama's lies--indeed the war crimes of both--is slanted to the liberal side.

>10 RickHarsch:: "I doubt the story was censored as you seem to be suggesting."

I'm not suggesting that it was actively or consciously censored. Rather, it was a subconscious lack of awareness: most of the coastal media lives in a "bubble" which remains unpenetrated by a variety of news stories and cultural phenomena, including, in this case, the dark side of abortion.

Journalists may indeed be crusaders for social justice; I'm sure some of them are.

But they are employees; not policy-makers. They can advocate for certain stories to be printed, ask that their research be rewarded; but in the end, they don't get to make the decision about what stories get included.

Journalists can claim, and want to believe, anything they'd like about their profession. And like most of us, they want to put themselves in the best light possible. So, it's not entirely fair to condemn them for not admitting that their job is to find stories that will generate money, not find stories that lead to social reform. Some stories do both, which is why journalists give them so much attention.

So, I suppose you could call journalists 'great big liars' and be correct. However, I doubt that this will make you any friends among the media, and will make them less likely to view your issues with any sort of objective consideration.

The issue of abortion, because it admits of no compromise, is devisive. It generates controversy (which is good to an extent), but it also generates extreme emotions on both sides. People who decide that someone is on 'the wrong side' tend to turn away from that source. And when your goal is attract viewers/readers, not drive them off...

I will point out that this story IS being covered. Not to the 'correct' level of interest that you deem appropriate, but it is available for those who are concerned and curious about the matter.

This is obviously a matter and issue of great importance to you. However, you should not presume that this story is of equal interest and concern to others. (You may feel that it SHOULD be...but that's another topic.) Your statements seem to imply that everyone who doesn't see how important this story truly is, is acting out of moral bias, rather than cold financial calculation. I submit that on a corporate level, this is not the case.

>12 BruceCoulson:: "Your statements seem to imply that everyone who doesn't see how important this story truly is, is acting out of moral bias, rather than cold financial calculation."

And I would submit that acting out of cold financial calculation rather than a concern for the well-being of society is a moral bias (of which Fox News is as guilty as any other, by the way and by way of illustration).

I would say, rather, that it's an amoral bias. Like every other for-profit organization on Earth, media companies are interested in bettering their bottom line. Not in making the world a better (or worse) place.

In short, the media is seeking its self-interest above all else. Now, often that self-interest means publishing stories that embarass or discomfit other powerful groups. It involves publishing stories that promote some type of social justice. But the true reason is that publishing these stories promotes the self-interest of the media.

So, if you are unhappy with how a news team covered (or did not cover) a story, don't bother trying to appeal to their conscience, their morality, or any other trait which organizations completely lack. Instead, appeal to their self-interest.

The bias that you see is based on the perceived self-interests of the news media. If you want to change that, you're going to have to convince them that the change will be better for their organizations in some direct, material way.

The media is FAR from perfect...however:

a) what is perceived as bias is often the result of newsroom cuts. There are fewer and fewer local reporters these days, and local stories do not get the play they used to. I wonder what the local coverage was on this story. (But even then, with local news being cut, fewer national outlets are looking to local papers for stories anymore, because they are harder and harder to find.)

b) I think it is hard to say what "the media" is these days. With the addition of the internet, we have the opposite problem of what I noted above. EVERYBODY has a blog. If you define the media as the sheer wall of verbiage that hits the internet everyday, it is impossible to follow. What is perceived as bias is often more likely stories were lost.

c) the role of the media is to make money. First and foremost. Above all else. Good old capitalism at work. people do not want to read about botched abortions. People do not want to think about abortion. It is messy and uncomfortable, and as a tragedy you cannot play Barber's Adagio and make it work. This is as unpopular a story as drone strikes are. Probably more unpopular. Reading about uncomfortable things does not sell ad space. Controversy sells, so you can sell a story about not covering the story but that is probably as good as it gets. Give us a homegrown bombing and manhunt. Do not give pictures of hungry children, sane Christians doing uncontroversial things, honest politicians doing their jobs, or corporate fraud BEFORE we find how many people have been ripped off. (the banking crisis was covered and predicted by more than few reporters before it was a crisis, but no one wanted to pick up the story in major outlets.)

d) Liberals think the media is biased against them. Conservatives think it is biased against them. I think it is just a very complicated system that produces a simplistic product.

...and thus they don't usually see a moral reason to cover the downsides of abortion with any type of objectivity or fairness.

Yet as Ridgeway Girl pointed out, this story could easily be spun the opposite way, the inevitable result of making abortions illegal. So why didn't any of those biased reporters pick up on that slant and run with it.

You would think someone would say, "If LEGAL abortions are this risky, imagine how dangerous ILLEGAL abortions would be!"

That was actually my first blush response on reading the story.

"I heard the news today oh boy" -- some folks only want "the news" to say what THEY think as per above (point "d"). I get MOST of "my" news from National Public Radio and I believe that it, uh "generally," does a pretty good job.

I don't watch "Fox" or CNN and even when I was a dedicated to Ronald Reaganite I didn't like Limbaugh because he never "debated," just pronounced and then shut opposing opinions off. (Pat Buchanan on the other hand never flinched from argument.)

RL's arrogance was/is huge and it seems based on telling ("his") people what they want to hear -- namely that "liberals" are an elite minority that runs everything (into the ground) and only Republicans who believe as "we believe" should be elected. But then Limbaugh will NEVER actually "talk" to a said liberal without shutting him up as per O'Reilly, Rush's younger and somewhat "nicer" (relatively) brother in arms eh.

Noam Chomsky once observed that the media has a "liberal bias" because that is to mean that one cannot go any further to "the left" than what the media indicates is "acceptable." There must be a corresponding "right"ward limit eh -- tea party yes but no "nazis" or Aryan brotherhoodlums?

It seems to me that Chomsky's point favors the right, "allowing" much more leeway in that direction and constricts the "radical" left which was his meaning I think but anti governmentalists (more "right" than "left" -- Alex Jones e. g.) like that characterization because they seem to hate liberals far more -- because liberals are supposed to have more "power," something I don't quite see in this right of center nation but there it is...

>15 Arctic-Stranger:: "(But even then, with local news being cut, fewer national outlets are looking to local papers for stories anymore, because they are harder and harder to find.)"

I don't buy the, "It was a local story," argument. Trayvon Martin was a "local story". The high school football players turned rapists in Steubenville, OH, were a "local story".

But somehow, those made it onto the national radar no problem.

(By the way, a search for "Kermit Gosnell" on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website turns up 766 results going back years, including a 2010 story detailing Gosnell's violations of health codes before his arrest, with a link to a previous story they'd done on one of the women he "treated" who then had to be rushed to the E.R. for complications.)

17> I thought the Doctor was performing illegal late-term abortions. Is that not correct?

>16 jjwilson61:: "Yet as Ridgeway Girl pointed out, this story could easily be spun the opposite way, the inevitable result of making abortions illegal. So why didn't any of those biased reporters pick up on that slant and run with it."

On the other hand, both local and state boards of health went for years, even after his initial license expired, without once inspecting his clinic. It seems to me that perhaps they were cowed into not doing more thorough inspections of abortion clinics for fear that the pro-abortion lobby would cry foul that they were "infringing the rights of women".

I can just imagine what the outcry would have been if his clinic had been shut down before he committed the heinous crimes of which he's accused -- and since he's black, the health inspector would probably have been called a racist, too.

I would think it was poor regulation, without any real teeth to it.

The Trayvon Martin story took a while to make the papers. And plenty of other similar shootings were not covered before that one.

It did have the makings of a good story, at least at first. Innocent black kid, walking through a white neighborhood gets shot for being black. Easy story to love. No mental imagines of aborted fetuses. (We as a society are used to seeing people shot on the silver screen, so we can relate to that. Aborted fetuses are another matter. Remember the stir behind the Silent Scream?)

To balance your list, look at the number of times the news reported NRA press conferences without commenting on them. Or how well they handle the misperceptions behind the Affordable Care Act vs just printing assertions that this will bust the budget.

As to Steubenville it was a local story that eventually made the big leagues, and for a variety of reasons, most likely the DA who pressed the case hard.

How a story makes it national is an interesting process, kind of like how an actor gets roles. It is more a matter of entertainment than news these days.

>23 Arctic-Stranger:: "No mental imagines of aborted fetuses."

Maybe we need to have that conversation, despite its difficulty and ugliness. One of the biggest reasons that the pro-life side has been pushing this story is that it illustrates just how ugly abortion can be. It makes us pay attention to the fact that the children we are slaughtering are, well, children.

The irony was rich at Newtown when President Obama pleaded for us to defend the most innocent -- since he doesn't seem to give a shit about the most innocent of all, the unborn children!

When we as a society can write off abortion as a cold and clinical procedure and nothing more, we write off a part of our humanity. Out of sight and out of mind, just like the poor kids starving and dying in our streets, their schools trashed because we don't care, their lives ruined and families torn apart by domestic violence, drug addiction, gangs, and incarceration.

That's an ugly side of American life, too, and we all too often try to ignore it. If we aren't forced to look at it, we won't deal with its ugliness.

Abortion is ugly, too. The Gosnell case is forcing us to recognize that very uncomfortable fact.

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ETA: It's been a long and exhausting week, full of pain both physical (for me, as I threw my back out and then my wife had a severe allergic asthma attack from the odor of the medicated ointment they gave me to treat the pain) and emotional. This post was probably written at a fuller throttle of emotion than normal, but then, despite my rigorous training in philosophy and logic, I've slowly discovered that the emotional is an essential part of the human story, too.)

I do not mean to minimize what you are saying, but so are colonoscopies. My point in saying that is that using the ugliness as a gateway is just not going to work. People are very capable of turning their heads and looking the other way.

I say this partly because many of the nurses I knew, who were pretty conservative and very evangelical had a pretty pro-choice attitude about abortion. They were used to colonoscopies and abortions and even the maternity ward nurses tended to be pro-choice. (I know this does not describe all nurses in all places at all times, and so you don't need to provide examples of the nurses you know who ARE pro-life. But enough who work in the field, in my estimation, are pretty immune to that argument.

In other words, some people just don't want to see it, and others who do see it, see it differently.

the harsh fact is that the pro-life movement has done more to push people to the other side than almost any other social force. It is as if they said "What is the worst possible way to get our point across?" and then adopted those methods.

Pushing the gore factor is one example of that.

>25 Arctic-Stranger:: "but so are colonoscopies."

How many human lives are destroyed by a colonoscopy?

Abortion is ugly. But illegal abortion is uglier. In this day and age we have the ability to reduce the number of abortions to near zero, but that would be an uncomfortable decision to both educate everyone, including teenagers, in how to prevent pregnancy and to make birth control easily available and free. We're more comfortable telling people, including married couples, that if they can't afford to raise a child, they must not have sex, than in facing the reality that that is an unreasonable expectation.

Can we take the pragmatic approach, even if it means putting aside our religious and emotive issues? If the women who visited Gosnell's "clinic" had had access to free birth control and had know exactly how to use it, most, if not all, of them would never have had reason to be there. Allowing a woman unfettered access to the means to prevent a pregnancy is surely a lesser evil than what occurred there.

#26

That was not my point.

>25 Arctic-Stranger:: "Pushing the gore factor is one example of that."

You are absolutely right on this one, and when I was an editor on a conservative student paper as an undergrad, I lobbied hard against the Editor-in-Chief's desire to print the graphic photos as part of a pro-life spread. I have never advocated the in-your-face protest techniques with the graphic posters, etc.

Far more important and far more successful has been the turn in recent years to offering alternative support services to pregnant women, so that they really do have a choice. In many of the poorest neighborhoods like the ones in Philly, the abortion clinic was the only choice for many women who had nowhere else to turn. In recent years, many have been working to change that by building and funding crisis pregnancy centers, which can offer support to a pregnant woman and allow her to find ways to carry a child to term and then, if she does not want to keep the child, to give the child up for adoption.

Walk into Planned Parenthood and say you have an unwanted pregnancy, and adoption rarely if ever makes the list of options presented to you -- which makes the idea of a "choice" pretty risible.

But the Gosnell case presents a unique, if difficult, opportunity to have a national conversation about what an abortion really is and what it really means for women to have a "choice". We haven't wanted to have that conversation, preferring instead to shuttle poor women to the abortion office and be done with it.

Furthermore, there is a fundamental racial issue here that nobody wants to talk about: the abortion rate for white women is between 20% and 30%; the abortion rate for blacks and latinos is over 50%.

And though you won't find it anywhere in their literature, Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, was a virulent anti-Semite and racist. One of the major reasons she advocated the legalization of abortion was as a form of eugenics and social engineering. She believed that the best solution to what she saw as the inferior and criminally-inclined poor black, Jewish, and other racial minority communities was to use abortion to prevent them from reproducing.

But we don't want to talk about any of this. We don't want to talk about the ways in which abortion has decimated the black and latino communities. We don't want to talk about the fact that poor women really don't have a "choice", despite the "pro-choice" rhetoric. And finally, we don't want to talk about just how brutal a procedure an abortion is.

THAT was my point!

And we refuse to talk about birth control or enacting policies that would allow a family with a low income to support another baby. Not a single pro-life group spoke out in favor of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (HR 5647). While I don't think that it's always deliberate, pro-life groups sometimes seem uninterested in the lives of the women and children once those children are born. Pro-life groups should be a powerful voice in advocating for legislation that protects low income families and especially women. They should be powerful voices in asking for effective sex education and affordable birth control. Until then, I suspect them of grand-standing -- taking a brave stance that looks good, without any real concern for actually solving a complex and difficult problem.

Abortion always means that something has gone badly wrong. But making abortions illegal is just hiding away the real problems, tidily, so good people don't have to look at it. Do you think that any of the women who went to Gosnell did so frivolously? Do you think that a certain number of those women would not have been there had they had access to birth control and the information needed to use it effectively? Would they have subjected themselves to a humiliating and dangerous procedure if we, as a society, had been willing to protect their jobs and provide them with the support they need to raise that child?

Mr Campbell, what material help does your group provide a woman who is unwilling to give her baby away and for how many years does that support continue?

>2 BruceCoulson:
Friedrich Engels was a rich capitalist, therefore my a priori theories tell me he didn't assist Karl Marx.

The Republican party is the party of Big Business. The New York Times is a Big Business. Therefore, my a priori theories tell me they always endorse Republican candidates.

Instead of being an a priori theorist I could check the facts, but that seems so, I don't know, charmlessly obvious.

#3: Why is a loud-mouthed radio host's sexism a vastly more important national topic than gruesomely slaughtered babies, titanic failures in government oversight, and inherent discrimination based on poverty and race?

Why is the right of half of Americans to participate in the political process without having their sex life discussed on national TV a less important national topic then one doctor in one city? Moreover, that was election season, and "Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said "it’s not the language I would have used." Fellow Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum dismissed the comments stating that "an entertainer can be absurd.""*

David Frum, former special assistant to President George W. Bush: "Limbaugh's verbal abuse of Sandra Fluke set a new kind of low. I can't recall anything as brutal, ugly and deliberate ever being said by such a prominent person and so emphatically repeated. This was not a case of a bad 'word choice'. It was a brutally sexualized accusation, against a specific person, prolonged over three days."* Isn't it appropriate that we as a society discuss whether such behavior is appropriate?

Dr. Gosnell is universally reviled; we can do the whole kitten burning thing, where we all rush forward to act like it's a huge moral step to come out against kitten burning, and that we're actually taking the stand against something that in reality nobody stands behind. Or we can focus on real controversies, like the behavior of the largest radio host in the US that some apparently support.

Why should government oversight in Philadelphia health be a national subject? Why should captured serial killers be prime time, except for the purely morbid entertainment aspects? You want to use this to talk about inherent discrimination based on poverty and race, and yet compare it to cases on the inherent discrimination based on race and gender.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh%E2%80%93Sandra_Fluke_controversy

> 35 Well stated. The only thing I see missing in what you wrote is that the gruesome nature of the case together with the media mea culpa will make the thing a circus.

>35 prosfilaes:: Eight people died in that Philadelphia abortion clinic. None died on Rush Limbaugh's show.

I'm sorry that you think the latter is a more important subject than the former.

>35 prosfilaes:: "Why should government oversight in Philadelphia health be a national subject?"

Because I'd be willing to bet that similar failures in oversight can be found around the country. I certainly don't think that it's a coincidence that the failure in oversight was connected to abortion -- I think it's entirely possible and even probable that a contributing factor to it was a reticence amongst officials to go anywhere near this hot-potato, similar to your own reticence here.

You don't want to have this discussion: you'd rather sweep it under the rug. Why? Is it because this issue of social justice doesn't line up with your political beliefs?

"You want to use this to talk about inherent discrimination based on poverty and race, and yet compare it to cases on the inherent discrimination based on race and gender."

Yes, I'm comparing it to other cases of discrimination that received far more media attention than this one. I'm not dismissing the underlying sexism (and violence) of Rush Limbaugh's comments, nor the importance of the huge national discussion that ensued. That was an important discussion.

You, however, are the one who wants to dismiss the importance of discussing the dire treatment and little attention this country gives to poor, urban, minority women. Their plight does not, in your opinion, rise to the level of a "real controversy". Why is that?

Sandra Fluke was a middle-upper class white woman with a top-flight education. She got lots of media attention, and it's a "real controversy".

The Philadelphia women were poor minority women whom our society failed at every step of the way, with education being a key underlying factor. They get no media attention, and you dismiss them as unimportant.

We all know Sandra Fluke's name -- do you know the name of any of the women who were victimized at Dr. Gosnell's clinic? Sandra Fluke was given the privileged opportunity of testifying to Congress -- all that was given to the women in Philadelphia was the cold shoulder, rank injustice, and your indifference.

Why are you so intent on ignoring the plight of poor, urban, minority women? Why won't you stand up for them in the same way you'll stand up for poor well-off Sandra Fluke? Why are well-off white women's problems of national importance, but poor, black women's problems something to be ignored?

Good. We're at a common starting point. The low income, low education and often minority women who are failed at every step of the way. Their choices and opportunities are limited before they're even born and narrow from there. What led them to the desperate decision to go to Gosnell's clinic? Why were they not given access to birth control and the information needed to use it? Where was the social support that would tell them that they are valuable and that help was available without shame or strings? Were was the school system, that didn't provide a clear, fact based reproductive education?

Can a government that cares more for the concerns of the wealthy and powerful than it does the needs of the powerless be said to be fulfilling its role? What can we do with a society that has elevated money into moral judgement (the more money you have the better a person you are)? We've developed a moral picture that says that the poor are there because they deserve to be, because they're lazy (although I think anyone who actually knows someone who is trying to get by on two or three minimum wage jobs - jobs that give you exactly enough hours so that the company doesn't have to give you any benefits - can claim this with a straight face). It says that an unwanted pregnancy is the woman's fault and she should have exercised a little restraint and not behaved like a slut, without caring one bit about the myriad of events and circumstances that brought her to that point.

It's lovely and satisfying to picket health clinics. To tell women they must bear their pregnancy to term and then give away the baby because they aren't worthy of raising it. To tell teenagers that birth control is terrible and ineffective, so that they believe that there's no point in using it. To tell a couple who have lost their jobs and can no longer afford health care, that they just shouldn't have sex. To judge others as incapable and unworthy of making the most important decisions in their lives. That's all done with the very best of intentions. And I think that feeling of doing the "right" thing and taking brave stances and telling others how they must live makes people feel very good about themselves. But it isn't addressing the real problems, it's just being a clanging gong or a resounding cymbal.

We have to take pragmatic steps to better the living conditions and life opportunities of the least fortunate. Even when it means hard, unobserved work. I'm with Arctic-Stranger on this -- we need to find the thing we can do that helps, that isn't words but rather actions, and work as hard, faithfully and with as much compassion as we can.

a contributing factor to it was a reticence amongst officials to go anywhere near this hot-potato, similar to your own reticence here.

...and some of the "reticence among officials" might be because extremists - including murderous domestic terrorists - are drawn to the issue like moths to a flame.

"Professional misconduct" is a difficult issue: doctors are averse to sitting in judgement upon their peers - and they are even more averse to destroying a fellow doctor's livelihood.

Yes, every city has bad doctors - and usually, matters of professional discipline are kept pretty quiet. The LA Times had near-zero reporting of a professional discipline case in Pennsylvania? That doesn't surprise me at all: they probably under-report professional misconduct in San Diego, too.

>39 RidgewayGirl:: I agree with everything you've said, except for the following snippet, which I believe misunderstands what at least some pro-lifers are trying to do:

"It's lovely and satisfying to picket health clinics. To tell women they must bear their pregnancy to term and then give away the baby because they aren't worthy of raising it."

The reason that the pro-lifers that I know, at least, make themselves present at abortion clinics is precisely to give women another choice, to give them access to alternative support services so that they don't feel pressured by poverty and social circumstance into seeing abortion as their only option.

But, as my wife repeatedly reminds me, once a woman has gotten to the point of seeking out an abortion such as this, we've already failed her multiple times. We've failed her most fundamentally in terms of education, in terms of helping her to understand that she needn't be held hostage to the sexual whims of her boyfriend, of helping her to understand that getting pregnant at 17 is NOT a good life choice, of helping her to value herself and her education sufficiently to make more responsible decisions.

Those are our social failures for not giving her a better chance and better opportunities to raise herself out of a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty.

>41 nathanielcampbell: I am interested in knowing what choice you or your friends offer women that they are not aware of until they arrive to the abortion clinic.

Regarding #38, you are overfrothing with emotion and swinging wildly about. The eponym of this thread is not a barometer for the neglect of urban/poor/minority. And I agree with someone, I think it was RG, who made the point that this is abortion made illegal, a glimpse into the so-called back alley scenario.
Anyway, I think what you are doing is taking single horrific story and making as much as you can of it to generate outrage to match the emotional attention you pay to the abortion issue. You are USING this issue in a way you might find abhorrent if it were someone else and a different horror.

>40 AsYouKnow_Bob:: "including murderous domestic terrorists"

Reductive stereotypes, anyone? This is as bad as characterizing devout Muslims as terrorists!

(Why is it that, when it comes to characterizing conservatives, liberals use the same types of ignorant stereotypes that they vociferously decry when it's conservatives doing the stereotyping?)

>42 RickHarsch:: " I am interested in knowing what choice you or your friends offer women that they are not aware of until they arrive to the abortion clinic."

Crisis pregnancy centers usually offer a variety of assistance and support, ranging from health services (i.e. prenatal care) to counseling to baby showers. Their point is to offer women the option of carrying the child to term rather than feeling that they have no other choice but to abort.

44: And you are at a place women chose to go in order to tell them about the choice they could have made?

43: You are being unfair. It seems to be true that 'murderous domestic terrorists' do like to target the abortion issue, actually targeting abortion doctors and clinics and Planned Parenthood premises. Can you think of any other common target of MDTs? Nothing is actually stereotyped in what you quote.

And then you follow with a pretty wild stereotyping of your own:

'(Why is it that, when it comes to characterizing conservatives, liberals use the same types of ignorant stereotypes that they vociferously decry when it's conservatives doing the stereotyping?)'

Who is liberal? How do you know?

>44 nathanielcampbell:, I'm interested in how much concrete support the group you're referring to gives women in raising the child if they don't abort. How many years of financial support do they offer, and what day care and vocational training do they provide? How long can the woman and her child live in the group's housing? I haven't yet found a group that was able or willing to support this family in the substantial and long-term way that would be more than leaving them to fend for themselves, worse off than before.

It's a daunting problem. An adult isn't a blank slate, grateful for the benevolence and willing to do what she's told. Often, there are factors that make helping her get her feet underneath her in a way that leaves her able to support her child emotionally, socially and financially very difficult. Having a woman who can't support herself, with a partner out there who may not have her, or the baby's, best interests at heart and may well be abusive, with little education or job training for the sort of job that could elevate her out of poverty, leave the crisis pregnancy group with a baby under her arm isn't a success story.

I don't mean to sidestep the abortion discussion, but on the subject of media bias there is one thing I think all media--left and right--is very guilty of: ignoring context and nuance. I think much of what we perceive as bias boils down to simplifying the story or the message into what the storyteller thinks is its key point, or to be more generous, it's "core truth." Media is really about turning things black and white, rather than discussing the various shades of gray.

In Nathan's original list of coverage of difference stories, for example, he sees compelling evidence for a liberal bias to under-report a story he finds illustrative of all the evils of a pro-abortion movement. It's so very clear to him that anyone who doesn't agree, "can't see the asymmetry in coverage in those numbers, then you are intentionally blinding yourself to the realities of media bias."

But I looked at that list and it did not look to me like "proof" -- it only raised more questions. Questions like, over what time period were all these stories reporting? Are four stories reported in a short span less coverage than 8 stories reported over a long one? Or, what else was in the news at that time? was coverage thin because it was under reported? Or was it knocked off the page by the fact that they just chose a new pope?

Without understanding the context, I'm extremely leery--even completely skeptical--of statistical evidence. And accusations of bias, after all, are at their heart accusations of ignoring context. And all media reeks of this particular flaw.

I agree with people who place the blame on profit motives. The real problem isn't that Rush Limbaugh is a right wing nut case. The real problem is that when he calls a press conference, people still show up. And they show up, because sensationalism brings in audience, and the larger the audience, the better the ad revenue.

#37: Eight people died in that Philadelphia abortion clinic.

That's 3 days worth of automobile accidents in Pennsylvania. Over the same 40 years, cars killed at least 50,000 in Pennsylvania. As Americans we're wracking up 30 to 40 thousand a year, 85 people a day in 2011. Again in Philadelphia, 318 people were murdered in 2011. You think Raymond Butts, a 22-year-old black male who died by a firearm on 6/26/11 got much news in Los Angeles? Heck, you think even the 618 murders in LA in 2011 got much ink in the Los Angeles Times, besides a few major ones? How about Dajon Daniels, 18, Marcus Robinson, 18, and Martin Osuna-Aguilar, 23, who all died on the same day as Raymond Butts? In 2011, 12,664 murders happened in the US, or 34 a day.

Proportionally speaking, this is a cruise-ship article. And that was a US-centric proportionally speaking.

#38: Because I'd be willing to bet that similar failures in oversight can be found around the country.

I bet that similar failures in oversight can be found in all sorts of fields; balancing costs with need over thousands of items (bridges, highways, doctors, child-care centers) is a hard problem, and the worst way to handle it is a bunch of news articles putting hyperfocus on one subject to the expense off all others.

The Philadelphia women were poor minority women whom our society failed at every step of the way, with education being a key underlying factor. They get no media attention, and you dismiss them as unimportant.

Whereas you're exploiting them to put the light on abortion. It's like The Jungle that Sinclair said was aimed at America's heart and hit America in the stomach, except that you darn well where you're aiming. They're not the focus, and they never will be in this story.

The Nathaniel arguments would have merit if there were a systemic concern, which there is not, not in terms of media bias, not in terms of horror clinics. On the other hand, there is a systemic problem with death by highway and gun. I've said before here and elsewhere, the US has nearly a Vietnam's worth of highway fatalities every year.
Murders are way down from the 70s and 90s (going by memory here, though I recall living in Chicago during a 900 plus murder year in the early 90s), down to the 12,000 plus mentioned above.

Thanks to RickHarsch at #46 for stepping in to say what would I have said in my own defense.

What I said was NOT a "reductive stereotype" - it was an accurate description of how this debate plays out: one side - the side unhappy with the status quo and with the societal consensus - decides to make their OWN law, and brings guns and bombs to the debate.

And people who do this are not the pro-choicers.

>46 RickHarsch: and 51: "Can you think of any other common target of MDTs?"

More people were killed by Tim McVeigh in Oklahoma City than have ever been killed by those targeting abortion clinics.

And before someone jumps all over me: I denounce in the strongest possible terms any use of violence by anyone against anyone. Such "MDT"s as you call them fundamentally betray any notion of "pro-life".

And in case ya'll haven't noticed: I've been just as vocal in my opposition to guns and support of the strictest possible gun control, for precisely the same reasons.

> 52 I don't think anyone here thinks you are bloodthirsty, Nathaniel.