The breathless coverage of the Woman’s March — even with the multitude of NSFW signs and costumes — shows that the mainstream media has every intent of pushing an anti-Trump message throughout the outsider’s presidency.
But what will highlight that fact even more will be Friday’s massive March For Life, which routinely draws hundreds of thousands of people who simply believe that abortion is not an ideal solution to an unwanted pregnancy.
Of course, the Women’s March deserved coverage. There were hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in more than 250 cities across America to voice their views. That is what America is all about. Hillary Clinton did, after all, get 65 million votes, some 3 million more than Trump, and the voices of those supporters should also be heard.
In that news coverage, though, the MSM often avoided the worst of the march: The violent attacks (a Muslim immigrant who owns a limo service saw his $70,000 vehicle set on fire by a pack of anarchists); the disgusting speeches filled with profanity (and threats of violence, as when singer Madonna said she wanted to blow up the White House); and the more belligerent and gross signs (like the one that said, for some reason: “Shut Your B*tthole”).
Everyone who follows politics inside the Beltway knows that the March For Life certainly will NOT get the same degree of coverage as the Women’s March. In a National Review piece this week titled “Crowd Sizes Matter To The Media Only When The Cause is Liberal,” writer Dan McLaughlin says: ” …virtually any reliable source on the March for Life acknowledges the sprawling size of the annual turnout, year in and year out, including busloads arriving from Catholic parishes and colleges across the country. But the media annually yawns and treats this simply as a ho-hum part of the annual DC landscape, not as a sign of broad popular resistance, after all these years, to the brutality of abortion, and tends to bury the story far from the front page. I can predict with great confidence that they will do so again this year.”
The March For Life has been growing larger each year. The Wikpedia page for the March says about 250,000 attended in the mid- and late-00’s, that number rose to 400,000 in 2011 and 2012. The crowd reached a whopping 650,000 people in 2013.
Terry Schilling, executive director of American Principles Project, a nonprofit supporting the nation’s founding principles, laid out what he’s become accustomed to expecting from the media when it comes to the March For Life:
Americans are growing increasingly skeptical of the mainstream media. This is happening for a legitimate reason. Media executives and political reporters would be wise to acknowledge this phenomenon and commit to a little self-examination. This weekend we saw an incredible case of anti-Trump, anti-conservative bias with the breathless coverage of the pro-abortion, non-inclusive “Women’s March on Washington.” This event received wall-to-wall coverage, with lionizing words like ‘historic’ repeated in headlines ad nauseum.
But every year, when the March for Life attracts hundreds of thousands of dedicated pro-life activists to Washington, D.C., political reporters tend to ignore it entirely. If the media wants to continue to be seen as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, ignore the march as usual. But if journalists are serious about improving their perceived objectivity and serving the American people at large, they should show up this Friday and give the tremendous pro-life crowds the news cycle they warrant.
This is a defining year for the pro-life movement. With a Republican House, Senate, and President, pro-life legislative goals are about to become pro-life legislative realities. The story is significant. Cover the March for Life.
This is a defining moment for America’s fourth estate.
This is a defining moment for America’s fourth estate. The media’s pathetic cheer-leading for Hillary Clinton brought the once-vaunted press to new lows, and their failure to see a resounding Trump victory — most MSM outlets predicted a huge win for Clinton — certainly didn’t help.
How the mainstream media covers the March For Life will foreshadow how they will cover the real issues Americans care about across the country. But don’t hold your breath for the same breathless coverage the Women’s March got. It ain’t gonna’ happen.