Pro-lifers have long understood the issue of media bias. Years ago, the late, pro-choice David Shaw wrote a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times showing how biased his own newspaper was when reporting on abortion. Shaw showed that bias came through not just on stories about abortion. Shaw showed how even stories that related to surgery on unborn children were skewed or spiked to avoid anything that might have a pro-life message.
Now, we have National Public Radio (NPR) lining up to support the pro-abortion side in the ongoing struggle over this issue. Managing Editor David Sweeney recently issued a memorandum to staff ordering them to use only the politically correct designations for the contending sides in the debate: abortion rights advocates is the approved way of referring to those who favor liberalized abortion; abortion rights opponents is the only way NPR will refer, from now on, to pro-lifers.
This should not come as any great shock to us. NPR has long been hostile to conservatives and traditional values. The part I object to most strenuously, that I think we should all object to, is that NPR takes public tax money to spread its pro-abortion bias.
You are more likely to hear about transvestites in Mongolia on “All Things Considered” than to learn about the 3,000-plus Pregnancy Resources Centers created and staffed by American volunteers. “Fresh Air” would be more likely to cover a hole in the ozone layer than to report on California’s underground reporter Lila Rose. Lila Rose’s brave and truthful reporting blew the cover off Planned Parenthood’s racist practices and disclosed how that world trafficker in abortion ignores laws on statutory rape.
There is little pro-lifers can do to stop the relentless pro-abortion bias of the New York Times. We can take some grim satisfaction in the fact that the Gray Lady is now in serious decline. The late Richard Neuhaus used to tease the Times by calling it “our parish newspaper.” He exposed its fundamental dishonesty over long decades. Newsweek, another liberal mainstay that sneers at pro-lifers, is now on the auction bloc.
If you are pro-choice and doubt my charge of bias and you dismiss the proof provided by pro-choice reporter, David Shaw, I ask you to take this challenge: Is there any group other than NPR, the New York Times, Newsweek, and the rest of the liberal claque, that does not get to decide what it calls itself?
Think of the old Soviet Union. It was never a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, although it called itself that. As soon as the Berlin Wall came down, most of those “republics” made a break for freedom. Hezbollah—the Lebanon-based terrorist outfit funded by Iran—has a name that translates “Party of God.” Do even liberal reporters and editors think Hezbollah’s activities are godly? Let Chastity Bono, the daughter of Sonny and Cher Bono, go through surgery and hormone treatments and is there a liberal publication on the planet that will not call this person Chaz and refer to this person as a man?
Pro-lifers alone are denied the right to be called what we call ourselves. Maybe it’s because liberal scribes see the power in the pro-life designation. Maybe it’s because they know that the truth can make people free.
Pro-lifers are not just against liberalized abortion. We object to elder-killing—what they call euphemistically, physician-assisted suicide. We protest cloning humans. So, according to Gallup, do 88 percent of Americans. We are against killing unborn embryonic humans to obtain their stem cells.
“Pro-life” puts our various “antis” into one neat, descriptive, and truthful phrase. Maybe NPR is doing us a favor, however. The president of the conservative Heritage Foundation described his first visit to Moscow after the Iron Curtain came down. He was accosted by an elderly Russian woman who thanked him profusely for all he had done for freedom.
“How did you know what we did for freedom?” he asked, noting that under Communism, the press was rigidly controlled. “Whenever they mentioned Heritage Foundation,” the grandmotherly Russian said, “they told us how bad you were. That’s how we knew you were good!”
So go ahead, NPR, continue your obvious and shameless bias. And the next time we have a Congress that listens, let’s demand that NPR do it on your own dime. Let NPR line up with the Times and Newsweek and see if you sink or swim.
Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow with the Family Research Council and is co-author of the national bestseller The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.