Has there been enough national mainstream media coverage of the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell?
This Feb. 23, 2010 file photo, shows the Women's Medical Society in Philadelphia. (Matt Rourke/AP)
The local press has extensively covered the shocking testimony about the Philadelphia "House of Horrors" where Gosnell allegedly killed seven babies and one woman since the trial began on March 18, nearly a month ago. But while it seems obvious that the national media has mostly ignored the story, a bevy of left-wing journalists and activists have loudly disagreed in recent days—asserting that the big three networks and the major newspapers have appropriately covered a trial that none sent a reporter to cover.
“If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story,” Irin Carmon wrote in a widely circulated Salon piece, “it’s probably because you failed to pay attention to the copiouscoverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (almost uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, here and here, to name some disparate sources.”
One should immediately be struck by how strange it is that a person who is claiming this is an important story—feminists wrote about it!—now seems angry that reporters are finally rushing to cover it. Shouldn’t she be glad?
As for her claim that there was “copious coverage” she links to RH Reality Check (Reproductive & Sexual Health and Justice), The Grio, Philadelphia Weekly, The Nation, CBS News’s Crimesider blog, and NPR. That so many of the people now rushing to claim that Gosnell was widely covered can’t tell the difference between activist media and The New York Times or CBS Evening News is a little scary. Of the outlets she listed, NPR is the only one that can reasonably be considered mainstream, so yea for that one story.
Some on the left are claiming that the reason the trial was ignored (even though it wasn’t really ignored—stay with me here) is because nobody cares about poor people. Carmin writes, “How often are the travails of the women whose vulnerabilities Gosnell exploited—the poor, immigrants and otherwise marginalized people—given wall-to-wall, trial-level coverage?” But if you search “Gosnell” at The Nation, there’s not a single story on the trial. A search at Salon showed one story: a set-up piece about the “looming” trial. Before today, search The American Prospect for “Gosnell,” and all you find on the trial is a story in January.
The problem is that the media apologists are battling a straw man. The column that started the firestorm over the media blackout didn’t claim that the mainstream press had “never” covered Kermitt Gosnell. I know, because I wrote it.
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