Feminism

Yesterday evening the Obama administration announced it would back down from plans to fight a federal judge's ruling that the Plan B emergency contraception pill must be made available over-the-counter and without age restriction in U.S. pharmacies. Previously the FDA permitted over-the-counter sales to girls and women aged 17 and older and the Obama administration wished to revise that age requirement down to 15.

But in reporting the story, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal omitted any objection from pro-life or parents rights groups, even as they reported the reactions of abortion rights advocates. "We are pleased that women should soon be able to buy Plan B One-Step without the arbitrary restrictions that kept it locked behind the pharmacy counter when they needed it most urgently," the Journal's Jennifer Corbett Dooren quoted Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights at the close of her 11-paragraph, page A3 story for Tuesday's print edition.

Virginia Democrats go to the polls Tuesday to select their nominees for lieutenant governor and attorney general (gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is unopposed). Turnout will be very low – thanks in part to The Washington Post. Notice of the primary election can’t be found until page B-6.

What are they hiding? Liberal lieutenant governor candidate Ralph Northam’s running TV ads touting his D-rating from the NRA and the heartfelt support of Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards. She loved how State Sen. Northam staunchly opposed having a woman look at her baby in an ultrasound before the baby’s killed. In a perfect juxtaposition, the ad runs Cecile’s praise while the screen says “endorsed by The Washington Post”:

In early 2012, after the breast cancer charity Komen for the Cure announced it would end its relationship with Planned Parenthood, the group quickly saw a 100 percent spike in fundraising. But alas, defenders of the nation's largest abortion provider and their accomplices in the liberal media, chief among them MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, struck back with a vengeance and the group eventually reversed itself under intense pressure from the Left. Ever since the epic Komen cave, however, the organization has seen faltering fundraising.

"Komen can't outrun Planned Parenthood controversy as race enrollment drops," the New York Daily News reported last September. Fast forward to today as the Lena Sun reported in the June 5 Washington Post that Komen is dropping "its signature 3-Day walk in Washington and six other cities next year, slashing the number of the fundraising events by half, as participation continues to drop more than a year after a funding controversy involving Planned Parenthood." By contrast, however:

Looks like Mike Barnicle's not going to let anyone get to his PC-left when it comes to women.

On today's Morning Joe, Barnicle claimed that "a lot of men . . . fear the fact—and I think it's a fact—that women are better balanced than men.  They have better judgment about things than a lot of men."  Barnicle's comment during a discussion about the statement made yesterday by Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant that the decline in educational outcomes for children today is due to the entry of women into the workforce.  View the video after the jump.

Laura Bassett at The Huffington Post reported Tuesday that Fox Business would not air a TV advertisement by the feminist group Ultraviolet that called for the termination of Fox contributors Lou Dobbs, Erick Erickson, and Juan Williams.

"Lou Dobbs has a problem," an announcer declares in the ad, over tiny out-of-context clips of the men speaking. "Women are winning the bread. Even his own network isn't safe from this source of lady breadwinners. Tell Fox to retire Lou Dobbs, Erick Erickson, and Juan Williams and spare them the pain of equality." 

Call me skeptical, but the upcoming "Women's Concert for Change" on NBC has the distinct odor of being yet another Obama administration propaganda tool.

Produced by Gucci's ChimeforChange.org, the concert will be a venerable Who's Who of liberal performers from Beyonce and Madonna to Julia Roberts, Ben Affleck, Arianna Huffington and even Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 

The Washington Post made a fool of its corporate self by starting a website called “On Faith” and putting at its head the secularist Sally Quinn. Oh, she claims to be interested by religion – just as King Herod thought Christ’s miracles sounded amusing, like he was a hippie magician like Doug Henning.

In Saturday’s paper, Quinn turned dead serious about sexual assault in the military, even asserting that “sexual assault is part of the military culture.” Naturally, Quinn puts a huge part of the blame on Christians, and the infection of their organizing groups in the military:

NPR has a seriously bad habit of running “news” stories that are stuffed with liberals...who then aren’t called liberals. On Thursday’s All Things Considered, NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner reported on how Team Obama is queasy about letting girls under 15 – middle-school girls -- get access to “emergency contraceptives,” even after a federal judge mandated they be sold to all ages. 

As Rovner put it, “the administration's decision to appeal that ruling has outraged many of the president's allies in the women's health community.” That’s what they call the aggressively “sex-positive” feminists. The only “conservative” view in this story was...Obama! Well, that's not fair. The Obama quotes they used were liberal-pleasers, too. Everyone else wanted to make America safe for sixth-grade sex.

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple spends a lot of time picking apart Fox broadcasts, but he was stunned by a Thomas Roberts interview on MSNBC with the new leader of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Ilyse Hogue. She claimed “we were the first out of the gate to call attention to this case.” Like a news butler, Roberts set her up to make that bizarre claim and then moved on to the next publicist's softball.

Wemple shot back: “Having done precisely 3,454 Nexis and Internet search on the Gosnell case, we missed the part where NARAL had led a charge to highlight the alleged atrocities in West Philadelphia.” He kept searching, and NARAL’s new boss kept looking sillier and sillier:

Last Friday, Obama made “history” by being the first president to address Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest purveyor of abortions. Obama did this in spite of the terrible timing, during the Kermit Gosnell trial. But like the Gosnell trial, Obama’s speech drew a blackout: no story on  ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, or NPR.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes hailed it was a "history-making" speech, but complained that Obama never used the A-word, which he should never feel ashamed to use. Rachel Maddow praised Obama for “putting a new capstone” on bold proclamations for the “right to choose.” USA Today and the Los Angeles Times somehow missed it. The New York Times blogged it – with this amazing paragraph from reporter Peter Baker as he mentioned Gosnell:

Over the weekend, the Reuters news wire posted a factually inaccurate piece about female priesthood.  On April 27, they said that a Kentucky woman, Rosemarie Smead, was ordained “as part of a dissident group operating outside of official Roman Catholic Church authority.”  Mead is one of 150 women worldwide that are ordained priests within their congregations, as they’ve chosen not to “wait for the Roman Catholic Church.”  Yet, the piece is riddled with inaccuracies, which wouldn’t be the first time Reuters got something demonstratively wrong.

Fresh off their George Soros obituary fiasco, Mary Wisniewski, who authored the piece, noted how 70 percent of U.S. Catholics support female priesthood, according to a NYT/CBS News poll.  She added that:

Seldom have I seen so many chauvinistic statements in one place as I have in an essay found at Guardian News.com written by an author whose work has appeared in "Time, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast." I post it as a media bias item because I believe that the views stated therein explicitly and implicitly affect how the press covers so-called "women's issues."

Here is just one sample: "I do consider any Harvard Law School degree obtained by a woman who then chooses not to use it in any sort of professional capacity throughout most of her life a wasted opportunity. That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women – or others in need of advancement – not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree." Other quotes, plus the identity of the author and a link to the essay, follow the jump:

The trial of notorious Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell -- as close to a demonic presence as anything this country will ever see -- was almost a month old when the network blackout finally ended. CNN broke its silence, as did CBS. National newspapers sent reporters to the trial for the first time.

They started covering it only because of a national outrage that they would so deliberately withhold this horror story from the public -- for political reasons.

The media's censoring of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial is appalling.  But why, exactly, are reporters failing to cover the Philadelphia abortionist's trial? Mollie Hemingway of the Patheos blog Get Religion thought she'd ask Washington Post staff writer Sarah Kliff, who responded via Twitter that she isn’t writing about it because she “cover[s] policy for the Washington Post, not local crime."

That, of course, is a patently ludicrous excuse.  In an April 12 blog post, Hemingway aptly noted that local crimes are often used to give context to a larger issue in public policy.  The Trayvon Martin shooting sparked a debate about Stand Your Ground Laws.  The murder of Matthew Shepard launched a debate around hate crimes, and awareness of bigotry against gays.  And as for the most recent case of a local crime story gone national, a day after the Newtown shooting, Kliff penned a piece asking, “What would ‘meaningful action’ on gun control look like?” The bottom line is that the Gosnell trial illustrates just how poorly regulated many inner-city abortion clinics are and how that lack of regulation can allow horror stories like Gosnell to happen.

Coverage of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's death and life was relegated to below the fold at USA Today this morning (pictured here; the paper stopped posting front-page pics two years ago).

Three items above the fold (excluding left-side teases to coverage of other stories) were considered more important that the Iron Lady's passing: "Remembering Annette Funicello"; a "Duplicate programs waste billions" item about wasteful government spending (useful, but it's not as if we didn't know this already); and to top it off, a 6x6 photo from the first half of the NCAA men's basketball finals, the result of which the paper was unable to report because the game ended after its publication deadline.

The liberal media have been gushing and fawning for weeks about Hillary Clinton beginning her obvious campaign for president.

Don’t count Arianna Huffington among them, for on ABC’s This Week Sunday, the founder of the Huffington Post actually said that Clinton not taking some time off to recharge herself is “sending a bad message to women that the only way to succeed, the only way to run is to drive yourself into the ground” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The national newspaper supplement Parade magazine is championing Chelsea Clinton on its cover on Sunday.  “The former (and potentially future) first daughter on her grandmother’s wisdom, finding her own voice, and the power of making a difference.”

The interviewer/flatterer is former ABC News reporter Lynn Sherr, who eventually makes her way to her usual path, proclaiming the gospel of feminism (and by extension, "extraordinary" Hillary). Chelsea, currently an NBC News staffer -- see "The Misery Continues" -- announced that positively everyone she knows is proud to be a feminist:

ABC, CBS, and NBC's Friday morning shows all devoted air time to President Obama labeling California Attorney General Kamala Harris "the best-looking attorney general in the country" at a fundraiser on Thursday. Unsurprisingly, a panel on NBC's Today tried to explain away the remark. Willie Geist asserted, "I think he [Obama] was making a joke." CBS This Morning's Norah O'Donnell was tougher on the President: "Maybe, [it] was not the right thing to say."

However, the Big Three newscasts didn't report that Mrs. Obama also got caught in a verbal misstep on Thursday. ABCNews.com's Arlette Saenz devoted a Friday morning item to how Michelle Obama mistakenly referred to herself as a "single mother" during an interview with WCAX, a CBS affiliate in Vermont.

President Obama caused ruffles on a fundraising jaunt to San Francisco when he said in a speech at a fundraising house party that state Attorney General Kamala Harris (pictured) was "by far the best-looking attorney general in the country." The Washington Post made a full story out of it, using the throwaway line the same way the media has done so often against Republican politicians, suggesting it was part of a larger pattern of regrettable behavior: "Obama rekindles talk of a White House boys' club."

President Obama reopened the debate Thursday over whether his administration is too influenced by men after praising the looks of Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general and a possible future gubernatorial candidate....Obama’s remarks during a fundraising trip to the Bay Area buzzed through Twitter and other social media, where reaction ranged from appalled to leave-the-guy-alone.

Late last year, NPR already proved its affinity for publicizing a vicious tale where the Virgin Mary is turned into a bitter atheist who denies the divinity of Jesus and hates the Apostles for trying to spread Christianity. But NPR proved it again....on Good Friday.

The news “hook” is the forthcoming Broadway adaptation, a one-woman monologue, set to open on April 22. So NPR obviously timed the piece to tweak the Christians. All Things Considered anchor Robert Siegel interviewed the actress, Fiona Shaw, and after he heard her read from this Christian-bashing work in an Irish brogue, he compared Jesus to an Irish Republican Army terrorist leader: 

The mainstream media are in love with Pope Francis, but it's not because of his conservative theology. It's because they see him as a potentially liberal pioneer for the Catholic Church. On Saturday’s CBS This Morning, the network ran a story that cheered on the pope in his supposed struggle against more traditional voices within the church.

Vatican correspondent Allen Pizzey drew the battle lines at the top of his report and let his viewers know who is winning the fight: “Well, the Easter celebrations are highlighting a struggle between the new, simple ways of Pope Francis and the conservative old guard of the Catholic Church. So far, Francis is keeping one step ahead of his critics.” [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

ABC wasn’t the only network to turn to atheist on Easter morning for some acidulous religion-bashing. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry turned to feminist Katha Pollitt to rip apart religions as “all invented by men for men” to repress women.

That came after Harris-Perry somehow compared the morality of abortion as a less weighty matter than access to water in the Third World. Once again, like last weekend, Harris-Perry referred to unborn babies as “things,” in this case “things in your uterus” that you can evacuate: 

You have to hand it to Washington Post editors. They're pretty slick. In hiring Jennifer Rubin as their token conservative blogger, they have a rightie who criticizes the Right enough to ensure they seldom have to actually put in the print edition excerpts of her posts critical of President Obama. In early March I noted how Post opinion editors excerpted a Rubin blog which bashed the conservative CPAC conference rather than say publish a blog post which attacked Obama and the media over sequester hype.

In the Monday, April 1 paper the Post was at it again, choosing to run a Rubin piece that sought to explain how socially conservative opponents of same-sex marriage "lost the fight" on the policy issue. But a review of Rubin's Right Turn blog archive shows a piece she wrote on Friday morning that would have been excellent to put in print and which attacked President Obama over his "gun histrionics." Here's an excerpt which includes many of her key points (emphasis mine):

Appearing on Tuesday's NBC Today as part of its Vatican coverage of Pope Francis's installation mass, former correspondent Maria Shriver offered a report that urged the Catholic Church to allow female priests: "Catholic women, and nuns in particular....cannot be ordained, they cannot say Mass and they cannot vote for the pope. Now millions of women think it's time for the hierarchy of this Church to open its eyes to the reality of what women can and should be allowed to do." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Speaking to Sister Judith Zoebelein, a high-ranking Vatican official, later in the report, Shriver wondered: "You know in the United States, we often talk about the glass ceiling for women professionally. Is there a stained glass ceiling?" The headline on screen throughout the segment read: "The Stained Glass Ceiling; Maria Shriver On Women's Roles in the Catholic Church."