The Post-Webster Press

THE HOSTILITY of the national media to the rights of unborn children is no secret. Report after report has documented both the personal pro-abortion bias of the media elite (the comprehensive Rothman—Lichter study of 1980 found that an astounding 97 per cent of television executives opposed any legal protection for unborn children) and its effects in terms of newspaper and television coverage.

Observers disagree on whether the bias is deliberate. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carlton Sherwood thinks it is. “The bias the press displays is well thought out,” he said in a speech in Denver in June 1986, “and calculated to crush any ideas which are at variance with its own.” On the other hand, it may simply be, as the Boston Globe’s legal-affairs reporter, Ethan Bronner, suggests, that “opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists … is not a legitimate, civilized position in our society.”

RC

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Richard Cowden-Guido

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THE HOSTILITY of the national media to the rights of unborn children is no secret. Report after report has documented both the personal pro-abortion bias of the media elite (the comprehensive Rothman—Lichter study of 1980 found that an astounding 97 per cent of television executives opposed any legal protection for unborn children) and its effects in terms of newspaper and television coverage.

Observers disagree on whether the bias is deliberate. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carlton Sherwood thinks it is. “The bias the press displays is well thought out,” he said in a speech in Denver in June 1986, “and calculated to crush any ideas which are at variance with its own.” On the other hand, it may simply be, as the Boston Globe’s legal-affairs reporter, Ethan Bronner, suggests, that “opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists … is not a legitimate, civilized position in our society.”