The big media outlets are overwhelmingly in the pro-abortion camp, so it hardly surprises to learn that ABC and NBC never mentioned the March for Life in its nightly news broadcast; CBS made a passing reference to it in a story on the controversy over a Republican bill on abortion. The only newspaper to run a story on the demonstration was the Washington Times.
We have known for three decades that those who work in the most influential media jobs have little interest in religion and are huge proponents of abortion rights. The two issues don’t have to go together—there are principled atheists such as Nat Hentoff who are pro-life—but usually they do.
The 1986 book by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter, The Media Elite, which was based on a 1980 survey of the media top brass, found that 94 percent of Americans professed a belief in religion and that 86 percent said religious beliefs were important to them; only 50 percent of the media elite held religious beliefs and 86 percent said they seldom or never go to church. Moreover, 90 percent of the elites were solidly pro-abortion.
The most politicized commentary on the March for Life was the piece by Michelle Boorstein in the Washington Post. She used the March as a platform to discuss the way activists who are not part of the pro-life movement are seeking to crash the event. Almost all of her 1018-word article was not on the big demonstration; rather, it was on the way the social justice crowd is trying to force its way into the pro-life rally.
Bill Donohue knows of no social justice conference or event that has ever had any interest in welcoming pro-life speakers. But there are plenty of social justice groups, such as NETWORK, that refuse, as a matter of policy, to ever address abortion. Then there is the National Coalition of American Nuns, another social justice group: it is openly pro-abortion, and has been for decades. Pro-life Catholics need to take note.
