Part One

As I explained last Friday, beginning tomorrow, I will be at the National Right to Life Convention. For the remainder of this week, I will be running previous editions of TN&V Today, in Part Two, I'm offering a piece on media bias that was well received.

How's That Again?
(This first ran in December 4, 2003.)

In the December issue of National Right to Life News, you'll find a first-rate story written by Laura Echevarria. She thoughtfully explores something that happens every once in awhile (and more often of late): the press frontally confronting obvious instances of pro-abortion bias. In this case the champion of fairness is the Chicago Tribune's equivalent of an ombudsman.

A reader had complained to "public editor" Don Wycliff about the headline of a story in the Tribune that discussed passage of the ban on partial-birth abortions. Get this for fair and balanced: "Anti-choice groups celebrate victories," in some editions, "Anti-choice victories alarm pro-choice groups," in others. Rather than hem and haw, Wycliff cut right to the chase.

"In either case, the flaw was the same: The perspective of those who define the issues involved in terms of 'choice' was taken as normative, and the position of those who disagree with them and define the issues differently was characterized in 'choice' terms. The result was two headlines that couldn't have been more slanted if they had come directly from the public relations office of NARAL Pro-Choice America."

That's the good news. The not-so-good news is that a blatantly one-sided perspective can extend to an entire article, not merely the headline. Let me offer a recent example.

We're also running this month a column by one of my favorite writers, Wesley Smith. Smith can write with precision, depth, and intelligence on just about any topic. In this instance his subject is the extraordinary possibilities adult stem cells possess for regenerative therapy. Adult stem cells are a source that carry none of the baggage associated with lethally harvesting embryonic stem cells from unborn babies.

Smith tells us that he was part of a seminar a couple of weeks ago that was covered (in a manner of speaking) by the Louisville Courier-Journal. Let me quote the relevant two paragraphs from Smith's article that first appeared in the Weekly Standard's online edition.

"The resulting story ('Cloning Opponents to Make Major Push to Ban Research,' November 23, 2003) never reported the actual content of our respective presentations. Instead, in a curious journalistic approach, cloning supporters from the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville were quoted extensively rebutting our wholly unreported remarks.

"Most egregiously, despite our having emphasized adult stem cell therapies as an efficacious and less expensive alternative to therapeutic cloning, despite extensive citations referenced by Dr. [David] Prentice from the voluminous successful adult stem cell experiments that have been published in the world's most prestigious peer-reviewed science journals, the Courier-Journal story contained not one word about adult stem cell research."

What a mindset. The reporter is so eager to tout the alleged potential of the egregiously mislabeled "therapeutic cloning" that he (or she) doesn't even bother to offer a glimpse of what Smith and his colleagues were talking about before it is rebutted.

However, as Smith writes, "Sadly, this experience is typical of the establishment media's general approach of either not reporting or under emphasizing adult stem cell research successes. … As a consequence, many Americans are woefully unaware that the best opportunity to obtain regenerative medical treatments in the soonest possible time is most likely with adult stem cell therapies, not therapeutic cloning."

Our complaint is not just that one side is treated with kid gloves while the other side's information is smothered in media indifference. It's more important even than that. Such lopsided treatment cheats the public out of a chance to fairly evaluate the debate over one of the fiercest biomedical controversies of the 21st Century.

And that's what newspapers and magazines are supposed to do: equip readers to make their own judgments. Their task is not to treat a contentious issue as if it were a contest between the forces of intelligent inquiry and those who have nothing to offer.

But that, of course, is why Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News exist. They provide a counterbalance to most "mainstream" publications which ordinarily don't give our perspective the time of day.

By the way, if you are not a subscriber to the "right to life newspaper of record," call us at 202-626-8828, and we will get you started with the latest issue of National Right to Life News.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.

Part One