Abortion

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's Piers Morgan Tonight, actress and comedienne Ali Wentworth brought up "reproduction rights" and Planned Parenthood as issues she is concerned about when host Piers Morgan turned the discussion to politics and what American women will be looking for in the presidential election. Wentworth began her answer by flippantly referring to her anatomy:

The Big Three networks' evening newscasts have all but punted so far on the 12 lawsuits filed on Monday against the Obama administration, challenging the abortifacient/birth control mandate which is part of ObamaCare. However, CBS actually followed up on their exclusive interview of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan on the regulation on Tuesday's CBS This Morning.

Correspondent Norah O'Donnell confronted Press Secretary Jay Carney during the Tuesday White House press briefing over Dolan's sharp critique of the mandate on the morning newscast: "He [Dolan] said that it's a 'strait-jacketing' and 'handcuffing exemption.'...Is that what the President is doing...strait-jacketing and hand-cuffing religious institutions?" O'Donnell's question didn't make it on the air on Tuesday's CBS Evening News or Wednesday's CBS This Morning, even after Carney evaded directly answering her question.

Nine prominent Catholic leaders have joined the Media Research Center to voice outrage over the broadcast networks deliberately withholding news of the momentous 43 Catholic entities suing the Obama administration for violating their religious freedoms. They represent major organizations including the Acton Institute, Cardinal Newman Society, SBA List and others. More are coming in every hour.

There are 60 million Catholics in the US.  The Catholic vote will be the most important swing vote this year.  So it’s not just a major policy issue, it is one with massive political implications.  Yet, 19 seconds of news coverage remains the only attention given by the evening broadcast networks. Two days after news broke, the tally is:

“[sigh] When will those mouth-breathing right-wingers give up their caves and clubs and learn to love science?” Pity the sophisticated liberal like CNN contributor Laura Sessions Stepp, whose impatience at Neanderthal misogynists and snake-handlers is palpable.

It’s also an act that helps them continue to push the falsehood that conservatives are anti-science and anti-contraception – and continue to play fast and loose with the facts in order to advance that narrative.

The evening news broadcasts all but spiked the largest legal action in history to defend our constitutionally protected religious freedom. The May 21 editions of ABC’s World News and NBC’s Nightly News refused to report the fact that 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Obama administration. CBS Evening News gave this historic news a mere 19 seconds of air time.

This is the worst bias by omission I have seen in the quarter century history of the Media Research Center. Every American knows about the Chinese communists withholding for 20 years the news that the US had landed on the moon, because it reflected poorly on the government. Our US media today are no different. They are now withholding news from the American people if it is harmful to the re-election of Barack Obama.

ESPN's Grantland website jumped on the bash Manny Pacquiao bandwagon on Thursday by giving a platform to a homosexual activist, who predictably trashed the Catholic Church as she took the Filipino boxing sensation to task for defending traditional marriage.

Writer Laurel Fantauzzo ripped the "the Church's cruel, untrue dictates about me," and promised if he didn't "evolve" like President Obama, "I'll simply have to sigh wearily and turn away from you, the way I've turned away from all of the idiotic bigots I've come across in my life, carrying a cross or a heavy book or a Constitution."

Rachel Maddow is perturbed that Republican Sam Brownback, governor of Kansas, said he will probably sign anti-abortion legislation he had not read.

Yes, you certainly have heard something along these lines before. Back in March 2010, two weeks before Obamacare became law, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unloaded a quote that will almost surely grace her obituary, saying of the 2,000-plus page proposed legislation, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy." (video after page break)

In the domain of what properly constitutes human rights issues, forced abortions and sterilizations have to fall in that category. So why isn't the Washington Post describing Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng as a "human rights activist"?

In two stories packaged side-by-side on page A9 of the May 8 paper, the Post's Andrew Higgins and Keith B. Richburg failed to use the term to describe Chen. Higgins tagged Chen a "blind activist," as in an activist who is blind, not an activist for the blind, but the term could confuse casual readers unfamiliar with Chen's plight. Richburg opened his story by tagging Chen as "the self-taught lawyer who has become the center of a diplomatic crisis between the United States and China."

Fifty-six percent of Virginians approve of Republican Bob McDonnell's job as governor and 49 percent believe the Old Dominion is on the right track. That contrasts with a 47 percent average approval rating for President Obama and an average of 32.7 percent of Americans who believe the country is on the "right track."

Yet the Washington Post chose to spin the polling numbers as a negative, noticing a downward trend from previous numbers and attributing the shift to "a contentious legislative session that drew large protests and national ridicule to the state Capitol."

TV star Cybill Shepherd went on a radical feminist bender on Friday's CBS This Morning, touting that there really is a "war on women" manifested by the "attack on Planned Parenthood." Anchor Gayle King had to cut her off, as Shepherd inserted her diatribe at the end of the segment, but revealed her sympathies with her guest: "I think you're raising a good point. We just need more time to do it."

The far left actress made her devotion to the pro-abortion cause clear, and hinted that pro-lifers were so extreme that they would try to kill her: "Abortion is our constitutional right. We should keep it legal. And also, birth control should be available to everyone....I'm coming to lead the next march on Washington, and I'm not going to wear a bulletproof vest. My mother's scared for me." [audio available here; video below the jump]

On today's CNN Newsroom, anchor Kyra Phillips interviewed Rep. Allen West (R-FL) about several topics.  One was gay marriage (video here).  West said that it's a states' issue and he didn't want to be taken "down a rabbit hole to discuss things that really aren't that important.  This disturbed Phillips:

On Thursday's The Ed Show, Ed Schultz insisted that there is indeed a "war on women" by Republicans as the MSNBC host responded to a recent interview by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus in which is mocked Democrats for the scurrilous charge. At one point, Schultz absurdly thought it insightful to claim that, "ironically," Republicans deny that there is a "war on women" even though they "lied us into a war nine years ago," referring to Iraq.

Schultz teased his Thursday The Ed Show:

The Department of (I don't know what kind of) Justice has decided to drop its case again prolife sidewalk counselor Mary Susan Pine and pay her $120,000 in legal fees. DOJ had no case in the first place.

If this were an antiwar protester or someone else favored by the left, this would be "DOJ run amok" news. But you will search in vain for a story about Ms. Pine at the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times (searches are on "Pine abortion," not in quotes). You will find 18 references to her in a Google News search on "Pine abortion" (not in quotes, sorted by date, with duplicates), only one of which is an establishment press outlet (Fox News). What follows is the press release from Liberty Counsel, which defended Ms. Pine, and excerpts from J. Christian Adams's related column at PJ Media (bolds are mine throughout):

As Politico's Dylan Byers reported on March 22, MSNBC insists that its programming from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern is straight news, rather than "point-of-view" programming. Clearly Alex Wagner of the 12 p.m. Eastern Now with Alex Wagner program hasn't gotten the memo.

Take today's program, for example, where Wagner mischaracterized a bill working through the U.S. House aimed at curtailing the interstate transportation of minors for the purpose of evading a state's parental consent/notification laws on abortion.

The mainstream media is reporting that donations to Susan G. Komen for the Cure have dropped substantially in the wake of its decision and subsequent reversal to defund Planned Parenthood.

According to the MSM, this must be due to disgruntled Planned Parenthood supporters, for instance this March 23 CBS News story:

New York Times reporter turned columnist Frank Bruni is on a nasty streak. He devoted his long Sunday Review column, "Rethinking His Religion," to a former classmate with a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. James Taranto at Best of the Web explained:

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has some insufferable friends. Yesterday he spent nearly 1,500 words profiling one of them, a classmate at the University of North Carolina whom he knew at the time as a conservative frat boy who "attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie." Bruni, who is gay, "kept a certain distance from him" under the assumption that the young man, whom he does not name in the column, would be hostile to the future Timesman because of his sexual orientation.

Saturday's front-page New York Times story by Susan Saulny focused on the Santorum campaign in Louisiana before Santorum's easy win in the Republican primary there: "On the Right, Santorum Has Women's Vote."

Saulny emphasized the religious angle of Santorum's appeal. The condescending story provided slight corrective to the paper's misleading previous coverage assuming Santorum lacked support from women, but maintained the unsubstantiated idea, embraced by the Times, that moderate Republican women are turned off by appeals to social conservatism.

On Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams touted the handiwork of Planned Parenthood's vicious attacks against the Susan G. Komen foundation: "The nation's largest breast cancer charity remains in turmoil tonight after a controversial attempt to cut off its funding of Planned Parenthood. Donations to the Susan G. Komen Foundation are down sharply in many areas."

NBC News, and Williams particularly, were quite complicit in furthering those attacks on Komen. On the February 1 broadcast, Williams declared: "A decision that's making a lot of women furious at the world's largest breast cancer organization. Why did it cut off funds for critical breast cancer screenings?"

On Monday the New York Times offered yet another unsubstantiated tale of the GOP scaring away female voters. Reporter Ashley Parker's story, under the headline "Romneys Court Women Alienated by Contraception Issue," not only fails to back up the headline, but contradicts itself.

The paper's own recent poll finding, buried by the paper last week, found most women oppose the Obamacare mandate that religious institutions provide contraception coverage. That tidbit from the poll didn't make it into Parker's story. And Parker didn't seem to realize the implications of a poll result she did cite: Social conservative candidate Rick Santorum is far ahead of the more moderate Mitt Romney among female Republican primary voters. If the paper's headline were true, wouldn't those "alienated women" be flocking to moderate Mitt instead of scary Santorum?

On ABC's World News on Saturday, host David Muir played a clip of an ad from the far left group MoveOn.org attacking Republicans on the issues of abortion and contraception, and asked correspondent David Kerley for his take on the ad.

Without noting that President Obama raised the issue of contraception by requiring some religious institutions to pay for contraceptives for their employees, or that ABC's very own George Stephanopoulos had bizarrely raised the issue even earlier in a Republican presidential debate, persisting to get an answer from Mitt Romney, Kerley blamed Republicans for "talking about contraception" as he asserted that the GOP had handed Democrats a "gift."

After playing the ad, host Muir wondered:

When the press wants to smear a conservative outfit, it embarks on a mission to find and highlight someone, no matter how peripheral their involvement or unreflective of that group's beliefs, to portray as somehow typical of their mindset. But when someone who is clearly a long-time activist in the "pro-choice" movement clearly betrays the truth -- that the movement really is pro-abortion without limits -- they're nowhere to be found.

I expect that to be the case with Jessica DelBalzo's latest item ("I Love Abortion") filed at RH Reality Check, and not merely because the press is so predictable. It's because the press ignored an arguably more outrageous commentary Ms. DelBalzo filed at the same site in August, where she proudly told readers that she had discussed abortion and with her two year-old child, and that all "pro-choice" mothers of toddlers who successfully escaped the womb should do the same thing -- before the "forced-birth bullies" have a chance to exert their awful influence.

Here's your daily dose of liberal hysteria, courtesy of New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal's Thursday evening post, "Grand, Old and Anti-Woman." Previously Rosenthal called Republican House Speaker John Boehner a racist  for asking President Obama to delay a speech to Congress.

Obama administration officials in the Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday they would pull all of Medicaid’s funding for Texas’ Women’s Health Program because the state decided to no longer pass those funds along to abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood. Instead of holding the Obama officials accountable for putting the interests of a favored liberal group ahead of the poor women of Texas, right on cue the CBS Evening News turned it into another tale of woe with women as victims in the loss of “free” services provided by the sacrosanct Planned Parenthood. 

“A fight over Planned Parenthood could leave thousands of women without health services,” anchor Scott Pelley ominously teased Thursday night, before introducing the report on how the “a growing dispute...could leave thousands of Texas women without access to health care.”

New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman portrayed conservative Republicans as reeling from the renewed focus on so-called women's issues, but only vaguely mentioned that Obama's approval ratings have actually slipped since the public focus on abortion and contraception, in his front-page story Thursday, "Women Figure Anew in Senate's Latest Battle."

CNN's Zoraida Sambolin questioned Rick Santorum's appeal with women voters nationwide as she targeted his "ultra-conservative" positions that "some women don't relate to," on Wednesday's Early Start.

Sambolin challenged Santorum's success among women voters in the deep south by noting that nationwide he lags behind President Obama in a recent poll of women voters. [Video below the break.]