RUTHFULLY YOURS

If anyone wonders why so many people hate, detest, despise the establishment media, witness Politico’s “news” article Monday night about Senate Democrats’ defeat of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

There will be more to say about the substance and repercussions of Senate Democrats’ vote last night refusing to protect infants delivered still alive after failed abortion attempts. What immediately rankles, though, is that Politico went to stupendous lengths to make Republicans look like cynical “bad guys” in the whole affair.

No neutral reporting allowed. No explanation of the New York, Virginia, and Vermont bills that catalyzed Republicans to introduce this Senate legislation, other than a sentence buried deep within the story mistakenly describing those state bills as merely having “loosened restrictions on third-trimester abortions.” Not even a semi-adequate recounting of the concerns forwarded by the bill’s Republican sponsors.

This was the headline: “Senate defeats anti-abortion bill, as GOP tries to jam Dems.”

Yes, really.

The smaller problem with the headline was that this bill would do nothing to stop a single abortion. It only applies to babies completely outside the mother’s body, after an attempted abortion has failed. (Also note: Politico puts quotation marks around “attempted abortion,” as if even that is a politically loaded term. Yet if a doctor attempts an abortion, but the baby is born alive, what other words could possible describe it?). This isn’t some run-of-the-mill anti-abortion bill; it’s about saving babies who by every single definition ever known to mankind are no longer fetuses, but living, breathing humans in the light of day.

The bigger problem, an unforgivable one journalistically, is that the headline sets the theme of the whole article that this bill is not an act of conscience, but a cynical ploy to “jam” Democrats. That’s the media’s rule: Every single story must paint Republicans as nasty manipulators, devoid of sincerity, ravenous for Democrats’ political blood.

The lead paragraph continued the theme, not allowing even a single sentence to expire before describing the Senate vote as “part of a Republican effort to squeeze Democrats ahead of the 2020 campaign.” Yes, a full 21 months before the next elections, Politico reports the bill is all about “revving up the GOP’s conservative base ahead of 2020.”

Politico quoted Democrats at great length about their complaints about the substance of the bill, but quoted Republicans only with regard to political calculations. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., gave an eloquent, heartfelt speech explaining his intentions, but the only line quoted by Politico was his accusing Democrats of “clap track for the campaign trail and for soundbites.”

The far more important part of Sasse’s Senate floor speech was this:

“Here are the facts: We know that some babies, especially late in gestation, survive attempted abortions. We know, too, that some of these babies are left to die, left to die. … This bill is exclusively about protecting babies that have already been born and are outside the womb. Every baby deserves a fighting chance. … We can come to the aid of innocent, voiceless, defenseless little babies who’ve just taken their first breaths by protecting him and her from mistreatment and neglect. This should be frankly the easiest vote we ever cast in this body.”

But no, says Politico. This is Republicans engaging in knife-fight politics. That’s it. This sort of coverage may not make the media “the enemy of the people,” but it definitely makes it the enemy of truth and basic decency.