For the fifth year in a row, there was no story in the Times print edition on the annual March for Life against abortion in Washington, D.C., which every year draws massive crowds in unpromising weather on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion..
Reporter Jada Smith’s Monday morning round-up post on the paper’s “Caucus” blog revealed just how clueless the Times was. Under the subhead “Happenings in Washington,” the Times highlighted these profound Monday events:
• The Boston Bruins, the N.H.L. Stanley Cup champions, will be honored by President Obama at the White House.
• There will be a ceremony in State Department’s Treaty Room with Han Duk-soo, South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, to sign a bilateral Environmental Cooperation Agreement.
Nothing about thousands of people marching down Constitution Avenue against abortion.
Even the two references made about the march at nytimes.com were accidental, done to explain where Sen. Rand Paul was headed when he was stopped at airport security by TSA in Nashville, leading editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal was led to incoherently argue: “Mr. Paul was on his way to a ‘March for Life’ anti-abortion rally. I can’t wrap my mind around the blatant contradiction here. A breezy airport security experience is essential to our liberty, but a woman’s right to choose isn’t?”
As Times Watch reported last January, the 2011 print edition of the Times did not feature an actual news story of the thousands who marched in frigid weather, just two photos with the caption “Abortion Opponents Rally On the National Mall,” above a three-sentence description that led to a link to photographs online. That was actually a vast improvement; the Times in print absolutely ignored the March for Life in 2010, 2009, and 2008 (a 300-word story marked the 2007 March for Life on January 23 of that year).
The Times is far more eager to publicize protests in support of liberal causes, no matter how puny. When four protesters marched in support of the doomed Dream Act to grant amnesty to illegal immigrant students, the Times marked the occasion with a 780-word story.
LifeNews Note: Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times. Click here to follow Clay Waters on Twitter.
