By Dave Andrusko
Editor's note. 1998 is the 25th anniversary of the noxious Roe v. Wade decision. As part of our year-long commemoration of this dreadful Supreme Court case, we're running in each issue either a revealing portrait of the abortion mentality written by a pro-abortionist, a critique by a prominent pro-lifer, or, as is the case this time, a damning expose of the pro-abortion bias found in the media written by a non-partisan.
This analysis is updated from when it first appeared in a slightly different form in the July 12, 1990 issue of NRL News.
Search high and low and you will find no newspaper media critic to rival the Los Angeles Times's David Shaw. Just this past week, Shaw thoughtfully discussed the deleterious effects on the ethics of news organizations of the enormous pressures of the 24-hour news cycle, cutthroat competition for viewers and advertising dollars, and the Internet. He is, in a word, a gem, although not nearly as well known as he ought to be.
Eight years ago Shaw wrote a four-part series on "Abortion and the Media." Published July 1-4, 1990, the basic question at issue - - how evenhandedly reporters cover the abortion controversy - - and Shaw's conclusions came early in the first installment.
"Although reporters (and editors) insist they don't let that happen [allow personal "pro-choice" beliefs to take precedence over the obligation to be fair and impartial], abortion opponents are equally insistent that media bias manifests itself, in print and on the air, almost daily," Shaw wrote. "A comprehensive Times study of major newspaper, television and newsmagazine coverage over the last 18 months, including more than 100 interviews with journalists and activists on both sides of the abortion debate, confirms that this bias often exists."
Shaw found "scores of examples large and small, that can only be characterized as unfair to the opponents of abortion, either in content, tone, choice of language or prominence." These practices fell into six broad categories:
° The media consistently frame the debate "in terms that implicitly favor abortion-rights advocates."
° Pro-abortion legislative and political victories are given much more prominence than are pro-life wins; ditto for rallies and marches.
° When events are favorable to the pro-life side they are "sometimes ignored or given minimal attention by the media."
° First Amendment questions as they relate to pro-life activities have been largely ignored, precisely the kind of issues about which the media ordinarily have been "long sensitive."
° Pro-abortionists are characterized more favorably and quoted more often. (Then PPFA President Faye Wattleton was the prime example.)
° Finally, most of the major papers' op-ed pages run more pro-abortion than pro-life commentary by a margin of more than 2-1.
Shaw reminded the reader that various surveys have shown that between 80 and 90% of reporters and editors favor the "right" to abortion. However, Shaw does not believe conscious pro-abortion bias is the source of the distortion. Instead he subscribes to the "newsroom culture" theory to explain media bias.
While Shaw overstated the extent to which in-depth exposure to the issue leads to reporter impartiality, he was persuasive in describing what happens when the average reporter or editor deals with abortion: "Abortion is but one of many subjects they deal with every day, and because most of their colleagues, associates and friends generally share their support for abortion rights, it may be inevitable that they have a skewed view of abortion opponents."
He made the case for unconscious bias with quotes from a number of reporters, some of whom are conspicuous by their history of non-partisanship, and others (ironically) whose bias has run from moderate to heavy-handed.
For example, Ethan Bronner, then a first-rate reporter for the Boston Globe, told Shaw, "I think that when abortion opponents complain about a bias in the newsroom against their cause, they're absolutely right." Bronner cited a story of his own on late-term abortions in which he had to fight a copy editor to retain such language as "destroying" the unborn by "crushing forming skulls and bones."
Bronner said the editor told him, "As far as I'm concerned, until that thing is born, it is really no different from a kidney, it is part of the woman's body."
While Shaw was simply not right when he argued that there was a "persuasive case" that pre-Webster [i.e., before 1989] pro-lifers received more favorable coverage on television than did pro-abortionists, he did an excellent job explaining how, post-Webster, the abortion lobby had been very successful in "insinuating their chosen terminology into the daily media lexicon." By that he is, of course, referring to the "Who Decides?" campaign.
Those "large and small" examples of bias run from choice of spokes people (those pro-lifers most easily caricatured and dismissed versus the silky smooth Wattleton), to the amount of attention she gets versus then-NRLC President Dr. Jack Willke (quoted nearly three times as much on the three networks, the New York Times, and the Washington Post during the first eight months of 1989) to the attention gatherings of the respective sides get. (NOW's annual convention in San Francisco received front page coverage in the July 2, 1990, "View" section of the Los Angeles Times while NRLC's annual convention, held in Sacramento June 14-15-16, received not a word.)
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It would be nice over eight years later to report that the series provoked an immediate and large-scale newsroom soul-searching, on the one hand, and justly deserved commendations from Shaw's peers, on the other. In a sorry chapter in a story already novel-long in length, the silence of the media establishment was deafening.
But Shaw's extraordinarily keen look inside the news business remains the benchmark. It is a tool pro-lifers can use productively in a dozen different contexts.
If you would like a copy of the series, drop us a line and include $1.00 for xeroxing and postage: NRL News, 419 7th Street, NW, #500, Washington, D.C., 20004.