What Do You Have to Do to Make Page 1?

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Real Clear Politics:

"Gosh, who do you have to decapitate to make Page 1 around here?" That was Michael Kinsley's question his first day on the job as opinion editor of the famously stuffy Los Angeles Times in 2004.

The story went: a bum had broken into the house of an elderly Hollywood screenwriter, hacked off his head, carried the head over the back fence, stabbed a startled neighbor to death, and made a run for it. He was finally tackled by a couple of Keystone security guards at Paramount Studios. The Page 1 query wasn't a rhetorical question, as Kinsley later explained: "t didn't make the front page. It ran in the Metro section."

Tens of thousands of pro-life critics (if we count social media, and we should) have been asking a version of Kinsley's question about the Philadelphia murder trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. They've made such a stink of it not being national headline news that it is now well on the way to becoming national news.

On Friday, press criticism website Get Religion's Mollie Hemingway reported on the reporters, so to speak. She asked several journalists whose beats ought to include the Gosnell trial why they weren't covering it and publicized the answers.

Health policy reporter Sarah Kliff took a drubbing for her insistence that she only covers "policy for the Washington Post, not local crime." Hemingway pointed out that Kliff had written something on the order of 80 stories on Todd Akin, Sandra Fluke, and the row over the Komen Foundation's decision (and then reversal) to stop funding Planned Parenthood. Those pro-choice friendly missives were deemed policy pieces, but this case, which has definite policy implications regarding the government oversight of abortion clinics, was simply a local crime story that she was free to ignore.

It didn't fly. Responding to the torrent of tweets and other criticism, the Post's executive editor Martin Baron released a statement that amounted to an apology: "We believe the story is deserving of coverage by our own staff, and we intend to send a reporter for the resumption of the trial next week. In retrospect, we should have sent a reporter sooner."

What is this case about? According to the grand jurors who determined there should be a trial, the case is "about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women." They explained: "What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy -- and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors."

The jurors called Gosnell's medical practice a "filthy fraud" which regularly "overdosed...patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths." They complained, "Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it."

That's overstating the matter, but only slightly. Gosnell operated abortion clinics from the early 1970s to 2011. His offices were raided by the FBI and DEA in 2010 and he now faces eight counts of murder and plenty of other charges. If Gosnell beats the rap, he will likely never be allowed to perform any medical procedure ever again -- including using a tongue depressor to look at your tonsils.

But even if Gosnell is finished professionally and headed to prison for the rest of his life (or even, in theory, to the death chamber), he was allegedly allowed to do some pretty horrible things for almost four decades. He was abetted in this by the politics of abortion. No other medical business could stay in business with the sort of abuses and gross violations described in the grand jury report.

________

 

The deafening silence.

[Valin]

Real Clear Politics:

"Gosh, who do you have to decapitate to make Page 1 around here?" That was Michael Kinsley's question his first day on the job as opinion editor of the famously stuffy Los Angeles Times in 2004.

The story went: a bum had broken into the house of an elderly Hollywood screenwriter, hacked off his head, carried the head over the back fence, stabbed a startled neighbor to death, and made a run for it. He was finally tackled by a couple of Keystone security guards at Paramount Studios. The Page 1 query wasn't a rhetorical question, as Kinsley later explained: "t didn't make the front page. It ran in the Metro section."

Tens of thousands of pro-life critics (if we count social media, and we should) have been asking a version of Kinsley's question about the Philadelphia murder trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. They've made such a stink of it not being national headline news that it is now well on the way to becoming national news.

 

 

What if Gosnell had used a gun?

What Is “News”?

Derek Hunter

4/14/13

 

When the massacre in Newtown occurred, it received wall-to-wall coverage, as well it should have. We’d never seen anything like this before – a mentally ill gunman shooting tiny children and their teachers in an elementary school. It shocked the senses and dominated the national conversation – as well it should have.

 

(Snip)

 

What was missing from the Gosnell story? Why did it not measure up? The details of Gosnell’s actions are so gruesome, so inhuman, as to defy belief. Were they too horrific? Did we not get pretty into the weeds on the Jeffrey Dahmer story?

 

And why are babies screaming as their spinal cords are snapped to “finish the job” considered not a story by the same people who bring us every shot, slice and stab of the Jodi Arias trial. The world had never heard of Arias or her boyfriend before his murder and, frankly, never should have after.

 

But a doctor on trial for eight gruesome murders with the implication of hundreds more approaches a serial killer level of fetish for death. Had Gosnell used a gun, we would know all about what he did. The president, the media and the leftists in Congress would have seen to it.

 

But the weapon here wasn’t a gun; it was progressive sacred cow – abortion......(Snip)

 

 

BTW WVR they are no longer silent. No now the Meme is We had 3 stories on this ove the last 2 years...What more can you ask! And besides those stupid Pro-Lifers by making abortion harder to get allow this kind of things to happen.