PBS "MEDIA MATTERS"
Broadcast January, 1997

Transcript from:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/mediamatters99/transcript2.html


Hello. I'm Alex Jones, the executive editor of Media Matters. Media Matters probes that controversial, feared, even sometimes hated group known as the news media. We look at how journalists work, and how WELL they do their critically important job.

Tonight Media Matters presents reports by three journalists who - this time - are taking a hard look at their FELLOW journalists. Nancy Hicks Maynard, formerly of The New York Times and The Oakland Tribune, will look at the debate within the media prompted by new technology that makes it EASY to alter photographs without ANYONE being the wiser. Are news photographs NEWS . . . or are they art?

Author and journalist David Remnick of The New Yorker examines the powerful editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, whose fierce conservative voice has made it the scourge of the Clinton Administration.

But first, we take a look at how the news media covered the effort to ban intact dilation and extraction, a procedure better known as partial birth abortions. There is no more divisive or passionately argued issue than that of abortion, and reporters are not immune to those passionate convictions. According to various surveys, most journalists - like most Americans - favor abortion rights. But a journalist's job is to put personal beliefs aside when covering a story.

We're going to explore how reporters' BELIEFS concerning abortion rights may have affected coverage of this VERY sensitive issue. The effort in Congress to outlaw this abortion procedure became a battleground off opposing views. But what are the facts? Terry Eastland, editor of Forbes' Media Critic Online, is our reporter.

SOUND MONTAGE OF CONGRESSIONAL DEBATES

Man
Never in my career have I heard a physician refer to any technique as a partial birth abortion. (Overlap)

TV Commentator
On Capitol Hill, abortion is re-emerging as a national election issue.

TV Commentator
(Overlap) victory for anti-abortion forces ...

(Overlapping Voices)

Woman
This is one of the most devastating (Overlap) and your child can really not(?) live.

TV Commentator
It's a very rare procedure, but it is the first time ... (Overlap)

Woman
And yet this bill would outlaw an emergency medical procedure.

Man
Why are we doing this ... to our children?

(Pause)

Man
This legislation forces us for the first time to acknowledge (Overlap)

top

Terry Eastland, Media Matters Reporter
In June of 1995, a bill was introduced in the Congress banning a medical procedure that its sponsors called partial birth abortion ... in which the doctors who performed it refer to as intact dilation and extraction. The bill was passed by Congress and vetoed by President Clinton in April, 1996.

President Clinton
... so that we don't put these women in a position, and these families in a position, where they lose all possibility of future child bearing.

Eastland
By October, Congress had failed to override the veto and the bill was dead. Over those 15 months, the press tracked the bill's political journey and yet failed to report the substance of the story.

Karen Tumulty, Time Magazine
I think that the coverage of the partial birth abortion debate has been abysmal. Uh, primarily because there are facts and figures being thrown around out there where basically facts and figures do not exist.

John Leo, U.S. News And World Report
I can't think of a major story in the last ten years that has been distorted as fully as abortion. And the partial birth abortion was so egregiously handled that I think someone should do a great book on how the press mangled this issue.

Eastland
A little known abortion procedure pioneered by a Los Angeles doctor that is usually performed after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The physician dilates a woman's cervix in order to pull the often living fetus feet first through the birth canal before collapsing the skull in order to fully remove it.

Eastland
Diane Gianelli of the American Medical News became one of the first reporters to write about this procedure when anti-abortion groups began targeting it in 1993.

Diane Gianelli, American Medical News
The abortion debate over the years has successfully been framed as a woman's rights issue. And ... the pro-life community for years has been trying to refocus the debate to get people to look at the fetus, or the baby. And they have not been very successful at that. So, when they found Dr. Haskell's(?) printed paper describing the procedure, and they came up with line drawings ... that was their ace in the hole.

Eastland
Anti-abortion groups created an ad featuring a graphic illustration of the abortion procedure using a description from an Ohio abortion doctor.

Douglas Johnson, National Right To Life Committee
We felt that this was one particular type of abortion on which there was really impeccable documentation. The baby, while still alive, is pulled out feet first ... everything except the head ... and then the head is punctured ... all of this while the baby is still alive. And so we thought this is something, perhaps, we can get enough support to do something about and save thousands of lives a year.

Kate Michelman, NARAL
The nature of this debate really gave them, the opponents of choice, an opportunity to sensationalize, inflame and ... and really draw attention away from what I consider and most people consider to be the central question in the abortion debate which is who should decide.

Eastland
Abortion opponents claim that the procedure was used thousands of times a year ... mainly in the second trimester of pregnancy ... and mostly on the healthy fetuses of healthy mothers. Countering their campaign, abortion rights groups said that the procedure was used only several hundred times a year ... mainly in the third trimester and almost always in cases of severe fetal deformity and to protect the health or the life of the mother.

Rep. Henry Hyde, (R.) IL
You wouldn't take a coyote, a mangy raccoon and treat that animal that way because it's too cruel.

Woman
There are emergency medical procedures done in the most tragic and painful circumstances ... and yet this bill would outlaw an emergency medical procedure.

Sen. Robert Smith, (R.) NH
Why are we doing this?

Eastland
Advocates on both sides made exaggerated claims. Many opponents of the ban said that the procedure was used only in dire circumstances, while supporters asserted that healthy babies were being aborted in the final weeks of pregnancy.

Eastland
Sorting through this rhetoric, reporters faced two key questions. How many of these abortions are actually performed, and under what conditions. The absence of accurate statistics added to the difficulties in reporting this story.

Andrew Rosenthal, The New York Times
With abortion, all you have are various people who gather reported abortions. There's the Guttmacher(?) Institute of people like this who collect statistics on reported abortions. Well, that could be 90 percent of them, it could be 100 percent of them, or it could be 20 percent of them. We have no idea.

Tumulty
The only people who really know how often this procedure is performed and for what reasons are the people who do it. And in trying to collect that information, you are first, you know, at the mercy of the anecdote. Uh, somebody can tell you what they do in their clinic, but that is far from an overall picture. And also you are going to have to rely on the word of people who don't want to talk about it ... and who have very good reasons not to talk about it. Doctors are harassed and stalked.

Eastland
Given the difficulties in getting reliable statistics, journalists tended to reduce the story to one of conflicting claims.

Jonathan Alter, Newsweek
The journalist will go to one side, and then go to the other side and think that by doing that they are reporting the story, uh, when in fact what they are doing is they are reporting on the politics of a story and the advocacy involved in a story, but not necessarily about the nub of the story itself.

Eastland
In reporting these claims, journalists tended to accept as fact assertions provided by abortion rights groups.

Tumulty
By and large most news organizations have been far more willing to accept what facts, figures and examples are offered by the ... the abortions rights side and to discount the other side's argument.

Eastland
The Washington Post reported that the procedure is believed to be used rarely, and mostly in cases when the woman's life is at risk or the fetus is seriously deformed. Citing unnamed national research groups the Los Angeles Times said that about 13,000 abortions are performed after 20 weeks gestation, and only about 500 involved the disputed procedure.

John Leo, U.S. News & World Report
David Shaw(?) did this wonderful series, as you know, years ago in the Los Angeles Times ... a huge four part series for which he was nominated for a Pulitzer on how the press routinely gets the abortion story wrong. And the reason that he concluded was that the newsroom is so pro-abortion that it can't get the story straight.

Eastland
Shaw's series based on his own examination of abortion coverage and interviews with more than 100 journalists did in fact come to the conclusion that a pro-abortion rights bias exists within the press.

Alter
Journalists are disproportionately liberal on this issue. So they're more likely to rely on either consciously or unconsciously, the information that they get from the pro-choice side.

Coreen Costello
We had one hope ... and that was that we would be able to hold our daughter (Overlap)

Eastland
Abortion rights advocates brought forth five women who had undergone the procedure for reasons of severe fetal deformity, and all in the third trimester.

Tammy Watts
I went in for a routine seven month ultrasound.

Eastland
Their cases immediately became the core of stories in print and on television programs such as NBC's Dateline and CBS's 60 Minutes.

Ed Bradley
Mickey Wilson(?) is a pediatric nurse and the mother of two children. In April of '94 she was eight months pregnant with her third child when she discovered her baby's brain was growing outside its head.

Tumulty
The piece that 60 Minutes did really fell into all the traps that this whole debate presented. They used these incredibly tragic examples, but examples that only portrayed basically one side of the debate.

Eastland
Echoing the position of abortion rights advocates, 60 Minutes focused on those abortions done by this procedure in the third trimester of pregnancy. The program made little effort to convey the view of abortion proponents that the procedure is most often used on healthy fetuses in the second trimester.

Tumulty
These women had these unspeakable tragedies. And because those were the cases that we were able to get to immediately, and get those people on camera or into print ... those are the cases we relied on.

Ruth Padawer, The Record
Most of the stories that I read said that intact D&E(?) occurred only for fetal anomalies or tragic circumstances and that's not at all what I found.

Eastland
Ruth Padawer, a reporter for the Record, a New Jersey paper was asked to research the abortion procedure. In September of 1996, some 14 months after the bill was introduced in Congress, her work led to the first independently researched article on the issue in the mainstream press.

Padawer
I was perplexed that the facts were in dispute. Uh, I had asked both sides to send me material and they both sent quite a bit of material. And ... uh, I was surprised at how far apart they were. Once I collected everything that I thought I needed from each side ... where they laid out their best cases, I decided to call physicians that I knew in New Jersey assuming that they would direct me to people in New York City or Pennsylvania. My understanding was that there were no intact D&Es in New Jersey. And in the course of our conversation the physician said, "I do them." And I was quite startled. I didn't realize that. And then he very frankly began telling me how he did them and how often he did them and what were the circumstances that brought women there.

Eastland
Through her conversations with two doctors and a clinic administrator, Patower discovered that in New Jersey alone roughly 1500 of the procedures were performed each year ... close to three times the number that abortion rights advocates had claimed for the entire country. And the procedure was mainly done in the second trimester on healthy fetuses.

Tumulty
Once the story was out they were immediately attacked and their figures were denied by the clinic involved. And they ... basically had no recourse to defend it other than to say, "We stand behind our story."

Padawer
I don't know how many abortions occur in that clinic. I am not there watching. What I do know is that two staff physicians independently told me those figures.

Eastland
Is it possible to verify Patower's reporting? In its coverage the Washington Post repeated mistakes made by many other newspapers. After complaints from anti-abortion groups, David Brown, a Post reporter and medical doctor, set out to discover the facts for himself.

David Brown, The Washington Post
I was not looking for anecdotes, I was trying to get some sense of getting the totality of these procedures ... what fraction of them involve pregnancies in which the woman's health is at risk, what fraction of them involved pregnancies in which the fetus is clearly not going to survive even if he or she is born at term ... and the only source of that information was the doctors.

Eastland
Brown's reporting resulted in two articles ... a co-authored front page story and a second, more detailed piece in the paper's health section. He drew his profile of the procedure from extensive interviews with five abortion doctors in different parts of the country.

Eastland
Can you describe for us what your reporting found?

Brown
My reporting showed that a large number, possibly even a majority of these procedures were done on normal fetuses ... most of them were done before the period of viability. Cases in which the mother's life was truly at risk were extremely rare. Most people who got this procedure were really not very different from, uh, most people who got abortions.

Eastland
The Washington Post and the Record were able to move beyond the rhetoric and the press releases to uncover key facts about this abortion procedure. Yet it took more than 14 months for those facts to emerge.

Alter
For news organizations to allow months to pass before they try to go out and do their own, independent assessment of the facts ... was a real problem. And they ... they let themselves substitute political reporting ... what was going on on the Hill, which is just a lot of unreliable, uh, advocates shouting at each other ... to drive out the real reporting, uh, of how many of these abortions were taking place and where, and at what time in women's pregnancies.

Eastland
And in the case of this particular story, reporters tended to accept as true the assertions of the abortion rights side ... despite evidence calling into question their claims.

Padawer
One of the unsettling things of what I found in the reporting, uh, was ... the discovery that the pro-choice side was playing fast and loose with the facts. And that that ... uh, that there's a credibility gap there that there wasn't before ... for me.

Gianelli
It's a very difficult issue to cover, uh, as a reporter because you have to ... you have to be not pro-life, not pro-choice, but pro-truth when you're writing these stories. Otherwise your stories will spin. You have to go to both sides, the primary sources, and then sit down and write it straight. And I think that's a very difficult thing to do.

Leo
It was very unfortunate. I think that the media, both TV and the print media, uh, used the arguments and often the language of the pro-choice side. They did not examine the ca... the weaknesses in their case, and I think the, uh, general coverage was ... varied from weak to openly distorted. I don't think the message was clearly brought to the American people what was at stake here.

Eastland
If a new bill banning the procedure is introduced in Congress, the press will be called upon once again. The question remains whether uncovering the divisive subject of abortion, the press can rise above the politics, and its own predilections ... to report the facts.

 

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