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Times Watch for April 23, 2004

Straight From the Pro-Abortion Stylebook

     Robin Toner's three stories on abortion this week are relatively unobjectionable in content--yet when taken together they reveal a biased pattern of labeling straight out of the paper's liberal stylebook.

     As usual with the Times and most other mainstream media outlets, groups who support abortion are blessed with their preferred description, "abortion-rights supporters." Yet pro-life groups are never called by their preferred designation, "pro-lifers." In fact, a troll through the last year of the New York Times on Nexis showed not a single instance of a news story using the term "pro-life" as a descriptive phrase.

     Taken together, Toner's three recent abortion stories include 13 mentions of "abortion rights," while the more negative-sounding term "pro-abortion" is absent. Within the last year that phrase also didn't crop up a single time in a description from a Times reporter.

     Meanwhile, pro-lifers receive less flattering labels that cast the movement in a negative, "anti-" light. Toner's three stories include seven mentions of "anti-abortion," two "abortion opponents," and one instance of "opponents of abortion."

     The headlines to the stories show a similar tilt: One features the term "abortion rights," one has "anti-abortion," and the other employs this loaded language: "Conservatives Try to Exploit Catholic Democrats' Views."

For Toner's Tuesday piece, click here.

For Toner's Wednesday piece, click here.

For Toner's Thursday piece, click here.

• Abortion | Labeling Bias | Religion | Robin Toner

Straight From the Pro-Abortion Stylebook

     Pete Coors, the beer baron and Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Colorado, could only find “it’s so outrageous it’s kind of funny.” On Thursday, the Times “National Briefing” reported on the upheld conviction of reputed Ku Klux Klansman Ernest Avants in the 1966 slaying of a black sharecropper. The picture illustrating the brief story on the killer was…Pete Coors.

     The Coors campaign found the error "so outrageous it's kind of funny," spokeswoman Cinamon Watson told the Rocky Mountain News, which first reported the boo-boo. Watson told the Denver paper that the Times is working on a story about Colorado's Senate race, spurred by Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell's surprise announcement in March that he would not seek re-election. Coors is opposed by former GOP Congressman Bob Schaffer in the primary. "I'm assuming they were pulling pictures for the Senate story and somehow got them mixed up," Watson said.

For the article (sans Coors picture), click here.

For the Rocky Mountain News account, click here.

For a picture of the actual Ernest Avants, click here.

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org