Presswatch/The New Intolerants
Eastland, Terry
PRESSWATCH THE NEW INTOLERANTS In its July 9 edition, Time reported that Louisiana had passed "the nation's most restrictive abortion law." Restrictive? Of what? Time meant that the law would...
...Yet Shaw observes that "the networks could just as easily stylize the o to represent a womb, with a drawing of a fetus inside...
...The Cuomo story wouldn't be hard to do...
...In the course of things, the New York Times editorial page took unfriendly aim at O'Connor, convicting the Archbishop of violating "the constitutional comity between church and state" by imposing a religious test for public office...
...Shaw's series appeared the same week as Time's abortion story...
...Reporters from the most prestigious news organizations have marched in abortion-rights demonstrations, but none has been sighted at a pro-life rally...
...The bias toward abortion rights seeps into coverage in ways not immediately obvious...
...When the networks present an abortion story, the backdrop often is the large word "abortion," with the first o in the word stylized into the biological symbol for female...
...The "new intolerants" apparently must learn to shut up, and to understand that free expression now requires taxpayer support of religious symbols, so long as they have been marinated in urine...
...C haw's series is not merely about the 1..3 language in which the abortion story is reported...
...Is Cuomo really opposed to abortion, as he says, or is he misrepresenting himself to the public...
...But Louisiana abortion opponents argued that the law would protect human life—that of the unborn...
...Asked why she instructed her staff to avoid the word "pro-life," a Michigan editor told Shaw: "We decided the issue was one of choice, not when life began...
...In vain I searched for the story that would have acknowledged that the meaning of the First Amendment (not to mention the Bill of Rights) has changed since early in this century...
...Two major media studies have shown that 80 to 90 percent of U.S...
...This world view includes by Terry Eastland not only a belief in abortion rights but also a libertarian fetish that distorts coverage of issues involving free speech and expression...
...Other media organizations, including CBS Evening News, are mulling the change...
...does not really describe, a Weltanschauung shared by a majority of journalists...
...and editorials over the past eighteen months, and conducted more than a hundred interviews with journalists and activists on both sides...
...It's standard journalistic fare, about integrity...
...About the only way to reconcile the 1990 editorial with its 1962 forerunner is to say that an archbishop may excommunicate a private citizen but not a politician...
...But their freedom to discipline is quite clear, and well within our constitutional order...
...Consider, for example, treatment of the effort to amend the Constitution in order to enable Congress and the states to prohibit flag burning...
...Consistently the issue was portrayed by the media in terms that most legislative opponents of the amendment desired—namely that it was an "unprecedented" attempt to alter the Bill of Rights...
...His bottom line: the media are biased in favor of abortion rights...
...Newsweek, for example, saw the flag amendment as part of "the new realpolitik," as one of those "values" issues that replace "serious" issues (budget deficits, educational decline, military spending...
...But Time was not alone...
...All three voted against the bill...
...The truth of the matter is that the Times wants the Catholic Church to butt out of politics when it questions the liberal agenda...
...C haw's series points to, though it k...
...Time meant that the law would restrict the right of a woman to have an abortion...
...On what principled basis can the Catholic Church be asked to treat its communicants differently...
...The American Newspaper Guild, which represents news and editorial scribes at many of the major newspapers, has endorsed "freedom of choice...
...There was no effort to ask whether there might be cultural problems more serious than those suggested by the labels the magazine used so freely in keeping with its libertarian fetish...
...Of course, whether they should do so, as a matter of prudence, in any given case, is another matter...
...He said it is "un-American...
...As Tom Bethell reported in the Wall Street Journal, this sentiment was quite different from one the Times expressed in 1962, when it applauded the Archbishop of New Orleans for excommunicating three Catholics leading the rebellion against a decision to integrate the church schools in that city...
...As Shaw notes, the media almost never refer to those completely in favor of abortion rights as for it "even in the final weeks of pregnancy...
...it is a comprehensive treatment of the journalism on abortion—as thorough as any done by any news organization, a welcome if rare demonstration of the press's own ability to scrutinize itself without fear or favor...
...But the magazine didn't lean on that open door of inquiry...
...And the newspaper's idea about constitutional comity provides solemn cover for its belief that conservative religion should be banned from the public square...
...Shaw asks: "Wouldn't the word 'strict' be more value-neutral since the legislation would be 'strict' both in its protection of the fetus and in its restriction of the woman...
...The media swarmed around the Archbishop, quitting their inquiry only upon finally extracting his confession: "I have never threatened to excommunicate anybody...
...While the artists were artists only and their expressions of art unproblematic, there were synonyms galore for those artbusters: "new intolerants," "morals squad," "rubes," "righteous," "bluenoses," "stiff-necked moralists," and "new moral watchdogs...
...And under the Constitution, priests (and shepherds of other flocks) are free to discipline their parishioners, politicians included...
...It also seems to have changed minds at the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...Time's choice of adjectives clearly favored abortion rights...
...And consider this Washington Post sentence reporting (so to speak) an anti-abortion vote by the Louisiana legislature: "The decision yesterday on a woman's reproductive rights was made by an almost all-male legislature...
...Just as, in David Shaw's words, "most reporters don't identify with abortion opponents," so do they not identify with flag-amendment proponents or, more to the point, even appear able to fathom their cultural concerns...
...Shaw says the media "have generally, if implicitly, accepted the abortion-rights view that there is no human life to be 'helped' before birth...
...Abortion-rights activists are quoted more frequently and characterized more favorably than their opposite numbers...
...Taking note of the Cincinnati obscenity trial (over display of Robert Mapplethorpe's work), the Florida obscenity ruling against music by 2 Live Crew, and the controversy over the funding and future of the National Endowment for the Arts, senior writer Tom Mathews divided the world into artists and "art-busters...
...Whatever one's view of the flag amendment —and I thought it a bad idea both times—journalism should have provided some historical and constitutional background...
...On July 1, the editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer expressed the spirit of the Times...
...Or consider that the media often characterize those completely opposed to abortion as against it "even in cases of rape or incest...
...Shaw's findings aren't surprising...
...Newsweek did include a quote from Pat Buchanan to the effect that there is a "culture struggle" between college-educated liberals and the "people who can't comprehend why the flag can't be protected...
...Instead, the best it could do was provide some political context...
...Changed, I should add, by judicial decree, in decisions such as those of the Supreme Court on flag THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 27 burning this summer and last...
...The bias shows up in lots of ways, not just the terms in which the issue is reported...
...David R. Boldt composed a column in which he, well, excommunicated the Catholic Church...
...More prominent play is given to stories on abortion-rights rallies and electoral and legislative victories than to stories on the same kind of events on the antiabortion side...
...And then all media hell broke loose, especially in New York, where Mario Cuomo is both a governor who supports abortion rights and a Catholic who claims he is personally opposed to abortion...
...But that doesn't work...
...In case it has to be pointed out, at issue in the O'Connor case is not the old (pre-1964) notion of the sacral state, in which the government must submit to the church's authority, but the church in its relationship with its own members...
...These newspapers now go with "strict" and its comparative and superlative forms...
...In a remarkable four-part series on media treatment of abortion, David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times reports that almost all media, print and broadcast, have used the adjective "restrictive" in describing anti-abortion legislation introduced in state legislatures over the past year...
...journalists favor abortion rights...
...To wit: How can someone who professes to be a good Catholic and personally opposed to abortion fail to do anything in his public capacity to limit abortion...
...A major problem with the O'Connor story was that it only concerned O'Connor...
...Doing that would have upgraded the flag-burning controversy to the "serious" category...
...Shaw examined major newspaper, television, and news magazine stories Terry Eastland is resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C...
...There was also a story to be written about Mario Cuomo, but the media took a bye...
...Consider Newsweek's recent cover story on art and obscenity...
...Now just who, Press-watch reader, are the "new intolerants...
...Or, I might add, as for it "even when the baby could survive outside the womb...
...The magazine certainly flunked the neutrality test...
...ardinal John O'Connor wrote this summer that politicians who claim to be good Catholics and yet persistently support abortion rights "must be warned that they are at risk of excommunication...
...I kid you not...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990...
...Of 105 representatives in the House, three are women...
...Events and issues favorable to abortion opponents are sometimes ignored or given minimal attention...
...Reporters (and editorial writers) in effect transmitted the view—not true—that the First Amendment means today what it meant 200 years ago...
...Shaw's newspaper has adopted his recommendation...
...The Post story ran on June 15, more than a month and a half after that newspaper's virtual non-coverage of the large Rally for Life in the nation's capital last April 28...
...It's too bad the magazine didn't have the benefit of his analysis beforehand...
Vol. 23 • September 1990 • No. 9
