Last week, pro-life students across the country walked out of their classrooms in protest of the war on unborn children. But you wouldn’t know it because the media stonewalled them, unlike the pro-gun control students who received wall-to-wall glowing coverage during their anti-gun walkouts.
According to LifeSiteNews, during the protest last Wednesday, the “three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) never once mentioned the pro-life walkout during their news shows on the night of the event.” Compare that to the more than 10 minutes that networks devoted to the pro-gun control National School Walkout Day. In total, the networks covered the March for Our Lives 13 times more than the pro-life March for Life.
Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America (SFLA), which helped to organize as many as 191 high schools and 81 colleges to participate in the protest last week, told MRC that nobody should be surprised by the media blackout on the protest.
“No one is surprised that media bias is so obvious when it comes to abortion,” she began. “People who are passionate about the life issue, about mothers and their preborn infants, know that the media doesn’t like to cover this human rights atrocity.”
“It’s still worth noting that the media went all in for the anti-gun walkout, talking about lives lost and free speech, while ignoring the #ProLifeWalkout, in which we mourn the fact that one-fourth of this generation has been lost to abortion, and students have a right to speak about that as well,” she continued.
Though Hawkins concedes that the gun walkout involved more people, she noted its popularity got more than just a helping hand from the media.
“The Astroturf nature of the anti-gun walkout, with lots of money coming in from politically well-connected, national organizations and celebrities along with the media and school support definitely helped with their turnout,” she said. “Or at least it looked good on TV.”
“Most major media will pretend it didn’t happen,” she added. “They will hope, by their actions, to hide the reality that people care about lives lost to abortion just as they care about lives lost to gun violence.”
Not only did the networks dedicate a full 10 minutes to the National School Walkout on gun control, but did so glowingly.
Lester Holt of “NBC Nightly News” praised the protest as an “unprecedented and powerful display.” CBS anchor Jeff Glor characterized the protest as “walkouts across the country.” ABC anchor David Muir of World News Tonight said the protests presented “powerful images playing out across this country” with students “staging a massive coordinated protest against gun violence.”
Schools also refused to give the pro-life walkout the same level of support as the gun control demonstration, even though one protests a “right” invented by SCOTUS justices while the other protests an inviolable right enshrined in the Second Amendment. Brandon Gillespie of Rocklin High School in California, one of the organizers behind the walkout, said the only accommodation his district gave was not punishing the protesters.
“They are not giving me any accommodation at all, except for the district policy of not punishing students for protesting,” he said. “That is not the accommodation that I asked for; I asked for the same accommodation as the anti-gun protest, that teachers would be flexible in their lesson planning, and also for the availability of equipment that the anti-gun protesters were allowed to use.”