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Times Watch for 04/22/03
“As a ban on a procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion makes its way through Congress, many of the doctors who provide abortions say they remain confused about what will be banned and fear it will apply to other procedures used in the second trimester of pregnancy.” So begins Mary Duenwald’s Science section story “Likely Ban on Abortion Technique Leaves Doctors Uneasy.” Notice the awkward weasel-wording (“that opponents call partial-birth abortion”), an old Times trope.
Duenwald deserves credit for spelling out the gruesome details of the partial-birth abortion procedure (medically known as intact dilation and extraction, or intact D&X). Too often, the same media types who complain about the lack of war gore on TV get squeamish when it comes to detailing abortion procedures in print.
But what’s fascinating is Duenwald’s internal, Gollum-style struggle over just how many partial-birth abortions are performed in America. Duenwald gives three different answers: “It is not known how often it is performed in the United States, but its use is limited to the latter weeks of the second trimester. Even then, it is not always the procedure doctors choose. In fact, it is practiced very rarely.” Got that? No one knows how often it’s performed, and it’s performed very rarely.
The debate resumes a few paragraphs later. “Over the years, an important question has remained unanswered: how many partial-birth abortions are actually done? In 2000, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, surveyed abortion providers nationwide and estimated that 2,200 such procedures were done that year, by 31 physicians. That would account for less than one-fifth of 1 percent of the estimated 1.31 million abortions performed in the United States that year.”
There’s our answer, right? Nope. Here’s the very next sentence: “But because not all abortion providers answered the survey, the estimate ‘could be off by a considerable amount,’ said Stanley Henshaw, a senior fellow at the institute.”
Several hundred words later, we’re back where we’re started, with the Times wanting desperately to convince us that partial-birth abortion is “very rare,” but unable to back up that hope with solid numbers.
The story also displays sourcing bias. Duenwald quotes Dr. David Grimes, “a former chief of the C.D.C.'s abortion surveillance division,” who harrumphs: “We can say with confidence the fetus does not feel pain. Neurologically, it is not developed enough to feel pain. A fetal brain in mid-trimester doesn't even look like a human brain. The neural pathways aren't there."
That’s reassuring, but would have been less so if Duenwald had included information of Grimes pro-abortion advocacy. Grimes helped found the Oakland-based Medical Students for Choice. Feminists for Life reports that in 1992 Grimes advocated medical residency programs “pressure residents to participate…by requiring them to arrange their own coverage if they choose not to perform abortions.” This from an advocate of “choice?”
In one of the group’s pamphlets, Grimes is quoted: “Abortion has always been with us, and it always will be: the question is, what price women will be forced to pay for abortion in terms of dollars and danger?"
Here at Times Watch, “we can say with confidence” that Dr. Grimes is not a neutral government bureaucrat but a pro-abortion advocate.
In a Stanford University lecture entitled “Opinions in a Time of War” Times editorial page editor Gail Collins said: “It is really important for the journalistic community to decide how to separate opinions from news. Objective journalism is a profession requiring a real passion for the truth.”
The story by Stanford Daily reporter Camille Rickets notes “Collins introduced the sensitive issue of news advocacy, citing radio personality Rush Limbaugh as a primary example. She said, ‘The news media has come to include in its ranks advocates, especially from the right.’ According to Collins, when this heightened sense of advocacy and unedited means of expression are combined, the result is contemporary confusion between objectivity and opinion. ‘Objectivity is not a standard — it’s a perpetual struggle to do the right thing,’ she said. ‘Sources for information are so multitudinous that there is no way to impose quality control.’”
But isn’t the real source of confusion journalists who let their political predilections seep into their news stories? Rush Limbaugh doesn’t claim to be an unbiased source of news. The Times does.
Responding to a question about the wisdom of using embedded reporters, Collins responded: “It’s always better to have a reporter there than not to have a reporter there. I can see how it would be possible to form a bond with someone whose job is to stop bullets from hitting you, but it was the only way to have someone there.”
Hmm. Would it be such a horrible thing for a Times reporter to bond with American soldiers? Apparently, yes: Next thing you know, Times reporters might want the US to win.
And is it really “always better,” as Collins argues, “to have a reporter there,” even when the regime is known to pressure media outlets to squelch unfavorable stories? That’s a subject of heated debate, thanks to an op-ed by CNN news executive Eason Jordan that appeared in none other than the New York Times.
Pain in Maine If Tax Cuts Reign
In a signed editorial, “Try Telling the Politicians in Maine That Tax Cuts Are a Great Blessing,” Francis X. Clines interviews one of that breed of Republican found only in the pages of the Times—a “fiscal conservative” that doesn’t want a tax cut: “[state Rep. Peter Mills], a rock-ribbed Republican and fiscal conservative, laughed out loud at the very notion of President Bush's dispatching emissaries to lobby the nation for still another big tax cut for wealthy Americans.”
Clines claims: “Maine has just finished freezing salaries and crimping benefits for state workers and retirees in enacting a dozen fiscal rollovers and rainy-day tricks even before the next federal cut hits. These are moves familiar in numerous states, now wrestling with scores of billions of dollars in deficits this year alone as statehouses and city halls become grim catch basins for the trickle-down conceits enacted in Washington.”
Then he gets positively poetic: “The tax-cut triumphalism of the GOP's ascendancy in Washington echoes out here like gross revelry from a cloud-veiled penthouse.” Toward the end, Clines indulges himself by proxy in a conspiracy theory, saying one liberal advocate “is trying hard not to believe the ultimate devil theory to be heard in statehouses: that administration zealots, time-warped with the old loathing of the New Deal, are intent on shrinking the federal government down to a debt-soaked relic of itself.”
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org