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We recorded our podcast before yesterday's business with VA politicians talking about late-term abortion, but I want to talk about it briefly as an example of the complaints I make about the media in segment 2:
nytimes.com/2019/01/31/opi…
nytimes.com/2019/01/31/opi…
Maybe you think that Ralph Northam was misrepresented by pro-lifers. Maybe you think the VA lawmaker talking about abortions up to 40 weeks was similarly treated unfairly. I'm not going to argue those points right now. I just want to make this one:
Here you have videos of Democratic politicians making at least seemingly shocking statements on a controversial issue where their party is *way* on the wrong side of public opinion. The kind of thing ripe for virality. The kind of thing that Twitter by its nature tends to amp up.
Yet somehow the same kind of mainstream (not left-wing) journalists and editors who were commissioning thinkpieces about white supremacy within an hour of the Covington video managed to control themselves, to resist tweeting the story, to hang back, to ask for context ...
... and then finally to write news stories framed as stories about "conservative backlash." The only place where there was a viral freakout was pro-life Twitter. Which tells you something, I think, about the resilience of institutional bias even in the age of social media.
There's a case for a mainstream media that handles viral outrages with caution and patience, and that frames debates in terms of "partisans say X" rather than just running with "X." But not for a media that only practices caution for outrages that stir up social conservatives.
If your *journalistic* instinct seeing, let's say, the undercover Planned Parenthood videos is "these must be selectively edited" but yr journalistic instinct seeing the 1st Covington video is "here's the true face of hateful whiteness," then you aren't a good gatekeeper. Period.
