The Media And Planned Parenthood | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Jon Ham, who is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    RALEIGH     It is beyond argument that the left long ago decided that abortion on demand was a key part of the liberal catechism. It's become the metric by which they measure all politicians.

    It has been that way for a while. In 1992, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania was denied a speaking role in the Democratic National Convention for fear he would discuss his pro-life views.

    It was not always that way, however. Famous Democratic liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and Sargent Shriver were openly pro-life.

    Second only to today's Democrats in fealty to abortion on demand is the media. Polls show that the media are pro-abortion to a far greater percentage than the population as a whole. To the media, the issue is as settled in their minds as man-made global warming.

    So imagine the turmoil the left and the media are in due to the recent release of several undercover videos by the Center for Medical Progress that show Planned Parenthood officials discussing how best to maximize profit from the corpses of babies taken in abortions.

    The media has vastly downplayed the videos or ignored them altogether. In 60 hours of news broadcasts (morning and evening news shows) in the 10 days after the first Planned Parenthood video was released, ABC devoted 46 seconds to the story, NBC a little over three minutes, and CBS a little over seven minutes.

    In daily newspapers, in most cases it was relegated to a back page, unless, as in The Washington Post, the story attacked the makers of the video, which garnered front-page placement.

    It always has baffled me why there is a political dimension to the abortion issue at all. As I've already said, liberal pro-life Democrats once were common on the political landscape.

    I was a liberal Democrat in January 1973, when I wrote the headline for the Roe v. Wade decision in my college daily newspaper, and yet I was then and still am anti-abortion.

    Even if a reporter or editor is pro-abortion, you would think that the notion of a fetal chop shop for profit would give them pause. Not so, apparently.

    I've searched in vain for any journalistic introspection or concern about the practice. What I find are editorials like The New York Times' "The Campaign of Deception Against Planned Parenthood" and a story in

    The Chicago Tribune about the great demand for "fetal tissue," as if that excuses the carnage.

    The media clearly are trying hard to keep this from becoming a huge national story, but word is that there are many more videos coming, each one more incriminating and damaging than the previous ones.

    If that's true, how long can the mainstream media ignore or downplay this story without looking completely irresponsible?