Rod Dreher

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Media bias and March for Life, Part II

By Rod Dreher • January 26, 2012, 7:20 PM

Mollie over at Get Religion has an amazing catch about the coverage CBS News’s website posted about the annual March for Life. Writes Mollie:

The online producers at CBS posted a photo slideshow the other day that appeared under the following rather literal headline:

Activists Hold Annual March For Life On Roe v. Wade Anniversary

So, just thinking out loud, what percentage of the pictures in this gallery would you expect to be of, well, the thousands and thousands of activists who traveled to Washington, D.C., in order to take part in the annual March For Life on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade?

If you guessed anything other than zero, you would be wrong.

There are literally no pictures of any pro-lifers in this feature.

Well, Get Religion gets results. By day’s end, there were plenty of photos of pro-lifers in that CBS online feature. So, good for you, Get Religion! But it is seriously appalling that hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers can gather on the Mall for a protest, and CBS cannot manage to get a single photo of them into its “gallery” of photos of the event. You really have to work hard to accomplish something like that.

12 Responses to Media bias and March for Life, Part II

Monterey says:

January 26, 2012 at 8:10 pm

It’s stunning that with all those people marching for life, there is next to NO coverage by the dinosaur media. If you don’t think there’s media bias, this is hard proof that there is.
If just 1/4 the # of those people showed up to protest FOR abortion, you’d have heard of it.
Erin Manning says:

January 26, 2012 at 8:39 pm

While I agree that the coverage, as usual, makes the headline someone came up with about 300,000 pro-life ninjas sneaking into D.C. and slipping quietly past the media pretty funny, someone also raised an interesting point at Get Religion, which is: the pro-life movement might want to try (again) to reach out to the media. There’s a right way and a wrong way, as follows:

Wrong: Hey, all you liberal paid media troglodytes who clap when babies get aborted and cheer for partial-birth abortion–come to a pro-life march!

Right: You know, perhaps the sort of embarrassing photo glitch CBS news put up after this year’s March for Life could be avoided next year if you’d consider sending a reporter and photographer to march with one of the groups–perhaps the group from Yale! Now, there’s a human interest story: Yale’s tiny pro-life group, a little sea of opposition to abortion in the midst of one of the most liberal college campuses in America. Wouldn’t it be worth the trip to travel with these kids, discuss their pro-life beliefs and how those beliefs are tolerated (or not) at Yale, and join with them as they march with tens of thousands of others for the end of legalized abortion on demand?
MIke says:

January 26, 2012 at 8:45 pm

But is it evidence of “bias” or poor editing and oversight. Getreligion never seems to understand the difference, especially on pro-life issues, which is why screaming “liberal bias” really loud isn’t effective. Unless you are Newt Gingrich.

The March for Life happens every year. While it deserves coverage, what is the level of coverage that is acceptable without pundits on the right screaming “bias.” If a reporter covered the event and pointed out that politicians and public officials avoid the event like the plague, would that be bias? If the don’t parrot the pro-life movement’s crowd projections, is that bias?

What exactly is press bias. We know what Getrligion thinks, but what really is the quantifier of bias, versus poor decisionmaking and bad editing?
Erin Manning says:

January 26, 2012 at 10:05 pm

Mike, “bias” is when you cover the event with an article that makes it sound like a handful of pro-life protesters met an equal sized number of pro-abortion protesters, and then show 14 pictures of the latter while failing to show a single picture (as was the case earlier) of the huge crowd of the former.

Not covering it at all, covering it with a sentence or two, etc. are fine. Covering it in such a lopsided way that doesn’t respect the reality of what actually happened is media bias in action.
BasilNova says:

January 26, 2012 at 10:36 pm

At the risk of sounding jaded, let me say that *yawn* marches are so 20th century. When was the last time they made any kind of difference in America? There must be a newer, better way to make a statement and grab some attention.
Rod Dreher says:

January 26, 2012 at 10:50 pm

But is it evidence of “bias” or poor editing and oversight.

Why would there be such catastrophically poor editing and oversight on this story, do you think? Are most leading news organizations in the habit of presenting a slideshow of a protest, but not showing the actual protesters? Why do you suppose they would have made this slip-up?

I don’t know what you do for a living, Mike, but I’ve worked in newsrooms for most of my career. Sometimes this kind of thing is intentional. Often it’s simply the case that everybody around you agrees on an issue, so you don’t even recognize that you’re not giving it fair coverage.

Do you even think it’s possible that the media are ever biased against pro-lifers, or religious conservatives?
Charles Cosimano says:

January 26, 2012 at 11:00 pm

I’m with the New Basil. No one cares about marches any more. The folks in them are all assumed to be unemployed folks who have nothing better to do with their time.
Mr. Patrick says:

January 27, 2012 at 11:04 am

It’s not only possible, but likely that the media is biased against pro-life activists.

On the whole, I’d have to say that depraved liberal journalists do almost as good a job at ignoring pro-lifers as saintly Republicans do when they hold the White House and both houses of Congress.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

January 27, 2012 at 11:38 am

Erin is right on both counts.

But I would say, that nearly all public expressions of opinion on Roe v. Wade should be ignored at this point. Been there, done that, now is there anything new in the world?
Mike says:

January 27, 2012 at 1:10 pm

Do you even think it’s possible that the media are ever biased against pro-lifers, or religious conservatives?

Sure. Not nearly as often as pro-lifers and religious conservatives believe, but I think it happens. But I think there is a cottage industry within those movements of screaming bias anytime they are unhappy with coverage. That’s true of every group who is unhappy with media coverage. The question, though, is whether it is really “bias.” Generally people shout “bias” when they mean “they don’t agree with me.”

Conservatives use the trope “liberal media” so often, it is now a phrase without meaning or content. It’s a selling-point and applause line, but not substantive.
Patrick says:

January 27, 2012 at 3:29 pm

@ Mike (8:45pm) and others:

This is how I explain “bias” vs. “bad editing”:

The gay pride parade is not only written up in the San Francisco Chronicle every year, it is *broadcast on television* in the Bay Area. The gay pride parade, like the Walk for Life, happens every year: except the Walk for Life is in it’s seventh year, and the gay pride parade has happened *every year since 1970*. If anything “isn’t news because it isn’t new”, it is gay pride in San Francisco.

But I don’t care if the gay pride parade is *more* well covered than the Walk for Life; I don’t care if the gay pride parade is on television and the Walk for Life isn’t. All I wanted, Mike, was *one* article in the local section of the Chronicle that mentioned the fact that “today, tens of thousands of people walked through our town.” Just one article in the *local section*: it doesn’t have to be front page, and it doesn’t have to be as covered as the gay pride parade.

That’s how I’d distinguish “bias” from “bad editing” or just “right wing carping” – which I totally admit happens enough.
Charles Cosimano says:

January 27, 2012 at 4:11 pm

I can see the Onion headline, “Thousands of marchers suddenly realize that no one gives a damn.”