NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/abortion/52772

Text File | 1992-12-23 | 11.8 KB | 250 lines

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Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wupost!howland.reston.ans.net!paladin.american.edu!gatech!concert!rock!taco!csl36h.csl.ncsu.edu!dsholtsi
From: [e-mail] (Doug Holtsinger)
Subject: Re: Meet Operation Rescue
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Keywords: Wichita, civil-rights activists
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Doug Holtsinger)
Organization: North Carolina State University
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 05:16:27 GMT
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---
Excerpts from:
   "Abortion foes stereotyped, some in the media believe",
   by David Shaw, Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1990,
   Reprinted in the Congressional Record, Oct 9, 1990 S 14817


  When abortion opponents picketed Turner Broadcasting System
  last summer to protest the showing of a film promoting abortion
  rights, TBS Chairman Ted Turner called  the  demonstrators
  ``bozos'' and ``idiots''.

  Many in the anti-abortion movement say Turner was simply giving
  public voice to what many in the media privately think of their
  movement.

  Some reporters agree.

  Journalists tend to regard opponents of abortion as ``religious
  fanatics'' and ``bug-eyed zealots,'' says Ethan Bronner, legal
  affairs reporter for the Boston Globe, who spent much of last
  year writing about abortion.

  ``Opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists... is not a
  legitimate, civilized, position in our society,'' Bronner says.

  Many journalists vigorously deny having this view.

  ``There's a certain amount of newsroom debate about abortion,''
  says  Eugene Roberts, executive editor of the Philadelphia
  Inquirer, ``and my general impression is that....there's a good
  deal of respect for both sides.''

  Tom Bettag, executive producer of ``The CBS Evening News,'' says
  CBS has ``a large number of people ... who feel very strongly on
  both sides'' of the abortion issue and ``that helps us cover it
  fairly. If we slip, someone inside tells us, `Hey, that's
  loaded.' It's a very constructive, worthwhile debate, a very
  creative process of each side trying to check the other and
  report this in as open-minded a way as you can.''

  But several reporters who have written a lot about abortion agree
  with Bronner.

  Cynthia Gorney, who covers abortion for the Washington Post, says
  she's troubled by the media's tendency to portray the anti-
  abortion movement as ``dominated by religious crazies'' and to
  ``ignore what I think are the very understandable and reasoned
  arguments that are put forth by the pro-life side.''

  But Bronner, Gorney, and Okie have covered abortion extensively,
  and they've come to realize that there are intelligent, rational,
  sincere people on both sides of what is an extraordinarily complex
  issue. Few big-city reporters--or editors, television anchors or
  news directors--have the opportunity that these three have had,
  though. Abortion is but one of many subjects they deal with every
  day, and because most of their colleagues, associates, and friends
  generally share their support for abortion rights, it may be
  inevitable that they have a skewed view of abortion opponents.

  ``Reporters often say to me, `Gee, you're reasonable', as if all
  pro-life people are unreasonable,'' says Mirianne Rea-Luthin,
  president of the Value of Life Committee of Boston.

  Reporters even try to perpetuate that stereotype, Rea-Luthin
  says, by asking her to ``make sure you look angry'' when she's
  being interviewed on television.

  Abortion opponents say the media further stereotype them, not
  only as fanatics but as almost exclusively conservatives.

  David Shribman of the Wall Street Journal, who has spent about
  40% of his time writing about abortion over the past year, says
  the media is mistaken in perpetuating this stereotype. The
  anti-abortion movement is actually ``one of the broadest
  political coalitions in American history,'' Shribman wrote on
  Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal last summer.

  Shribman pointed out that the movement includes feminists,
  opponents of the death penalty and people opposed to U.S.
  military involvement in Central America--all positions
  customarily associated with liberals.

  [....]

  Abortion opponents insist that this failure to give them ``fair
  representation'' is typical of the ``double standard'' the media
  apply to the abortion debate.

  Nowhere is the media's ``double standard'' more true, critics
  say, than in the treatment given Operation Rescue and other
  aggressive abortion protesters, on the news pages and the
  editorial pages alike.

  Abortion opponents realize that newspapers have the right to
  express their opinions on their editorial page and that, in most
  newspapers, that opinion favors abortion rights. But they don't
  think most papers apply the same standard to them as they do to
  others involved in public controversies.

  Abortion protesters say they have been the victims of police
  brutality, overzealous prosecution and the misapplication of a
  federal statute designed to fight organized crime, and the media
  have largely failed to defend or even question the civil liber-
  ties implications of these actions.

  ``These are the kinds of issues that the media would normally
  make a big stink out of,'' says Wendy Wright, communications
  director for Operation Rescue. ``But they don't stand with us
  on abortion so they ignore what's being done to us.''

  Or, as Wright's boss, Randall Terry, likes to say: ``Most of the
  secular media has become the lap dog, the ideological slave of
  the death industry. The fervor of their commitment to abortion
  makes them willingly blind to the abuses and injustice that we
  have faced.''

  When the federal government used the RICO act--officially, the
  Racketeer-Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act--against white
  collar criminals on Wall Street, major editorial pages questioned
  whether this was an appropriate use of a statute originally
  designed to fight the Mafia and other ``scurvy hoodlums,'' in the
  words of the New York Times. A Los Angeles Times editorial said
  flatly that the RICO act was ``out of control and ought to be
  repealed.''

  But the RICO act is also being invoked in civil suits against
  Operation Rescue (and other abortion protesters), and while the
  Philadelphia Inquirer, Wall Street Journal, and a half-dozen or
  so medium-sized newspapers have editorialized against this, most
  of the major papers--the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Bos-
  ton Globe, Chicago Tribune--have ignored it. (The Washington Post
  included a paragraph critical of this application of the RICO act
  near the bottom of an editorial praising court action against
  Operation Rescue in a non-RICO case).

  Editorial page editors deny that bias against the anti-abortion
  movement has influenced their policies.

  Jack Rosenthal, editor of the editorial page of the New York
  Times, says he didn't even know RICO was being used against abor-
  tion protesters until told of it in the course of an interview
  for this story.  Thomas Plate, editor of the editorial page of
  the Los Angeles Times, said the absence of any RICO/abortion
  cases in Los Angeles was largely responsible for his paper not
  having commented on the issue. The Los Angeles Times did include
  a sentence in an editorial last year saying that charging Terry
  with conspiracy in a non-RICO, Los Angeles case was an ``exces-
  sive restriction on free speech.''

  But the Los Angeles Times publishes many editorials on subjects
  with no immediate local connection, and newspapers in Phoenix,
  Lexington, Richmond, St. Louis and St. Paul--all far more locally
  oriented than The Times--have editorialized vigorously on the use
  of the RICO act against abortion protesters, focusing primarily
  on a case in Philadelphia.

  While supporting conviction of the protesters for trespass and
  disorderly conduct, these papers editorialized that using the
  RICO act against them was an inappropriate restriction of legiti-
  mate political protest--``unfair,'' ``unreasonable,'' ``outra-
  geous,'' ``an abomination.''

  Newspapers have generally covered the various court decisions
  involving RICO and Operation Rescue in their news pages, but
  there have been few examinations of the civil rights threat that
  some say this use of the statute poses. The Wall Street Journal
  published such a story in May, but most other RICO stories have
  emphasized its use in white-collar cases.

  Similarly, there have been major media stories asking if the
  government, in its zeal to prosecute drug traffickers, is using
  ``measures that may erode basic rights'' of the accused, as a
  Page 1 story in the New York Times put it last October. But there
  have been few stories raising questions about the erosion of
  basic rights by the ``police brutality'' that Operation Rescue
  activists have alleged in dozens of cities, not even after
  Congress enacted a law last year banning the allocation of
  certain federal grants to cities that fail to prevent such
  ``excessive force.''

  The Los Angeles Times has written two long stories this year--one
  on Page 1--about the special weapon (a nunchaku) and special
  ``pain--compliance'' techniques--the infliction of pain to force
  protesters to follow orders--the police have used in these cases,
  and the Chicago Tribune published a similar story last year. But
  apart from an Op-Ed page column in the Wall Street Journal, the
  subject has been largely ignored by the national media.

  Nor has there been a flood of outrage on the nation's editorial
  pages, as there was when civil rights activists here and anti-
  apartheid activists in South Africa accused police of brutality.

  Most major editorial pages were equally silent when the U.S.
  Supreme Court earlier this year refused to grant a stay against
  an injunction prohibiting Operation Rescue from demonstrating at
  abortion clinics in Atlanta.  Columnist James Kilpatrick, who
  praised another court decision unfavorable to Operation Rescue
  activities, criticized the Atlanta decision as an unconstitu-
  tional prior restraint on speech.

  ``Something is grossly wrong,'' Kilpatrick wrote, ``when the
  courts tell freeborn Americans that they may not speak before
  they have spoken.'' A few other columnists--Nat Hentoff, Charles
  Krauthammer, Mark Shields, Fred Barnes--have criticized the
  treatment of abortion protesters, but most commentators and
  editorial writers have been largely silent on civil liberties
  issues involving abortion protesters.

  It can be argued, of course, that the intimidating tactics used
  by Operation Rescue ``traduce [sic] any kind of civility and go
  beyond the limits of reasonable discourse,'' in the words of Jack
  Rosenthal of the New York Times.

  Although Operation Rescue says police are responsible for the
  violence at their protests, the courts haven't necessarily
  agreed. But many Operation Rescue protests are not violent, and
  while they certainly could not be described as genteel, many
  civil rights and anti-war protests weren't genteel in the 1960s
  and 1970s, and the media covered these activities heavily and
  often defended the First Amendment rights of those involved.

  Coverage of abortion protesters' problems has been so slight that
  both Rosenthal and Meg Greenfield, editor of the editorial page
  of the Washington Post, said they had never heard of the ``pain-
  compliance'' practices and resultant charges of police brutality
  by Operation Rescue.

  Rosenthal and Greenfield said they try to give anti-abortion
  forces the same respect and attention they give abortion-rights
  advocates, but Greenfield conceded that, in general, ``I can't
  say it would astonish me to learn there's a double standard in
  writing about them.''

  [....]