Old Media Slowly Awakens to Gosnell Horrors

Old Media Slowly Awakens to Gosnell Horrors (use link for videos)

 

The key word is slowly; if you haven’t seen it yet, click over to to Hot Air for the photo of row after empty row of seats in the media section of the trial of Kermit Gosnell. But Terry Moran of ABC’s Nightline slowly awakens to the horrific Gosnell story:

As Jim Treacher responds, “Don’t tell us. Tell your viewers.”
In contrast to Moran, Mollie Hemingway of Ricochet receives a telling response from a Washington Post reporter when asked why the Post has largely embargoed coverage of Gosnell: This is a local crime story, not a national one. This is not the story we were looking for; pay it no mind. The droids in the newsroom can go about their business. Move along.
But Erick Erickson of Red State finds another liberal Washington Post employee — and one of their known men on the Journolist (or whatever it’s called these days), which can do so much to promote or kill a story in the MSM, finally noticing Gosnell:

Last night on twitter, Dave Weigel of Slate noted he was just hearing from twitterers about the gruesome trial of Kermit Gosnell. Those who care about the story owe a tremendous debt to Kirsten Powers taking to the pages of USA Today to write about it.
It is fascinating how much of a bubble the media lives in with that bubble so DC-NYC centric. It is again one of the problems for news organizations like CNN as it tries to rebuild. With the exception of Fox News, the American news networks focus on the things people along the coast are interested in and not what people along the American river valleys are talking about.
In churches, local restaurants, and small town hair salons a lot of people across the country are talking about the terrible trial of Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania. It’s just not the people who interact with those who produce the news in New York City.
In fairness to CNN, unlike many other mainstream media outlets, it covered the Gosnell arrest back in 2011, but moved on. Only Fox, which is the number one news network largely because it actually cares what people outside the DC-NYC bubble care about, has stayed with the story.

The name of Erickson’s article is, “Can You Imagine the Coverage If It Were Dogs?”

Liberals, and even reporters who try to be fair minded, often complain that conservative decided to leave and go do their own media thing with Fox, talk radio, etc. Well, this is an example of why conservatives had to do that. Otherwise many stories many Americans care about would never be told.
Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night through the course of the trial. It’s sad that a man who engaged in horrific acts of barbarism will never be as known to the public as Casey Anthony or George Zimmerman because Gosnell’s crime is viewed as less than a crime by the vast majority of the producers of American news.

But even there, like leftwing playwright Lillian Hellman, today’s leftwing media is more than willing to cut their consciences to fit this year’s fashion. How many sportswriters — particularly in Philadelphia — were eager to welcome Michael Vick back to the NFL?
Not to mention completely erasing this moment from a best-selling presidential autobiography out their minds:

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

As I wrote last year, the real story isn’t what Obama did as a kid living in Indonesia; it’s the dry, detached tone in which he brings it up, both in the 1990s when the book bearing his name was written, and when he read its text for its book on tape version a few years later — and when he read from his book at a public appearance:

 

So yes, I can imagine the coverage if dogs were involved. And the media looking the other way there, too, if need be. At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds that the Gosnell trial is currently in its “undernews” phase, as the MSM tries to work out the appropriate storyline to ensure that it can do the least amount of harm to the MSM-DNC overculture:

This reminds me of Mickey Kaus writing about “undernews,” stuff that people will eagerly chatter about online but which “respectable” media ignores, at least temporarily. Typically it relates to rumors like John Edwards’s affair, which people whispered about for months but which big media, because it couldn’t nail down the story and/or because it was politically “unhelpful,” refused to cover. The first suspicions about Anthony Weiner started off that way too. One of the many surreal elements of the Gosnell story is that it’s somehow ended up as undernews even though, as Moran aptly says, this degenerate may in fact be one of the worst serial killers in history. It’s not a rumor; he’s on trial by the State of Pennsylvania with a death sentence on the table. But somehow it’s not suitable for media coverage.

Which is why the story could still also be simply tossed down the Memory Hole at this point.
As Wikipedia is apparently debating right now with the Gosnell story.
“I don’t suppose I have to mention Orwell. You were already on that page,” Ace writes. “And so was Wikipedia.”
However, if there are any old media journalists who’d actually like to do their jobs and report the story, Elizabeth Scalia is offering “Easy, Logical, Fair Angles to Pursue on Gosnell Story” at her Anchoress blog.
Update: Tweet from JD Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times with the photo of the empty seats at the Gosnell trial found via Pundit and Pundette and added to the top of the post. And note this:
As Mark Steyn writes, in the MSM if it bleeds it leads (a motto that has its origins in Philadelphia-area news, incidentally) — until in this case, it doesn’t.
More: On the PJ Media homepage a Tip Line for old media:” Did Your Editor Spike Kermit Gosnell Coverage? Report It Here Anonymously. Your employer is making serial infanticide a left/right issue. You know that’s not what you signed up for.”
Margaret Sanger could not be reached for comment.

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/04/12/media-slowly-awakens-to-gosnell-horrors/