Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 29, 1990 TAG: 9007290222
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID SHAW LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Her message was clear," Okie recalled recently. "I felt that they were saying, `You're hurting the cause' . . . that I was being herded back into line."
Okie says that she was "shocked" by the "disquieting" assumption implicit in the complaint - that reporters, especially women reporters, are expected to write only stories that support abortion rights.
But it is not surprising that some abortion-rights advocates would see journalists as their natural allies. Most major newspapers support abortion rights on their editorial pages, and two major media studies have shown that 80 percent to 90 percent of U.S. journalists personally favor abortion rights. Moreover, some reporters participated in a big abortion-rights march in Washington last year, and The Newspaper Guild, the union that represents news and editorial employees at many major papers, has officially endorsed "freedom of choice in abortion decisions."
On an issue as emotional as abortion, some combatants on each side expect reporters to allow their personal beliefs to take precedence over their professional obligation to be fair and impartial.
Although reporters (and editors) insist that they don't let that happen, abortion opponents are equally insistent that media bias manifests itself, in print and on the air, almost daily.
A comprehensive Los Angeles Times study of major newspaper, television and news magazine coverage over the past 18 months, including interviews with more than 100 journalists and advocates on both sides of the abortion debate, confirms that this bias often exists.
Although responsible journalists do try to be fair, and many charges of bias in abortion coverage are not valid, careful examination of stories published and broadcast reveals scores of examples, large and small, that can only be characterized as unfair to the opponents of abortion, either in content, tone, choice of language or prominence of play. For example:
The news media consistently use language and images that frame the entire abortion debate in terms that implicitly favor abortion-rights advocates.
Abortion-rights advocates are generally quoted more often and characterized more favorably than are abortion opponents.
Events and issues favorable to abortion opponents are sometimes ignored or given minimal attention by the media.
Many news organizations have given more prominent play to stories on rallies and electoral and legislative victories by abortion rights advocates than to stories on rallies and electoral and legislative victories by abortion-rights opponents.
Columns of commentary favoring abortion rights outnumber those opposing abortion by a margin of more than 2-1 on the op-ed pages of most of the nation's major daily newspapers.
Newspaper editorial writers and columnists alike, long sensitive to violations of First Amendment rights and other civil liberties in cases involving civil rights and anti-war protests, have largely ignored these questions when Operation Rescue and other abortion opponents have raised them.
Television is probably more vulnerable to charges of bias on abortion than are newspapers and magazines. The time constraints and ratings chase intrinsic to most television news programs often lead to the kind of superficiality and sensationalism that result in bias.
But throughout the media, print and broadcast alike, coverage of abortion tends to be presented, perhaps subconsciously, from the abortion-rights perspective. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Webster case a year ago that states could have more latitude in regulating abortion, for example, many media stories termed the decision "a major setback for abortion rights."
Couldn't it also have been called "a major victory for abortion opponents."?
Yes.
But most reporters don't identify with abortion opponents.
It is not that there is a conscious bias on abortion. Rather, "the culture in the newsrooms just assumes that abortion is right," contends John Buckley, longtime media spokesman for various conservative politicians and now a corporate consultant.
Abortion, Buckley says, is the first issue since the Vietnam War in which some journalists' instinctive allegiance to their own "social class and generational world view is stronger than their professional allegiance to objectivity."
Surveys consistently show that abortion is essentially a class issue in the United States; the more money and education a person has and the less religious a person is, the more likely the person is to favor abortion rights. Since most big-city journalists tend to be better paid, better educated and less religious than the general public, it is not surprising that they also tend to favor abortion rights by a large margin; in fact, a 1985 Los Angeles Times poll of journalists on newspapers of all sizes showed 82 percent in favor of abortion rights.
Despite a growing evenhandedness in recent months, the personal preference of so many in the media for the abortion-rights position clearly "affects coverage very fundamentally," in the view of Ethan Bronner, legal affairs reporter for the Boston Globe, who covers the U.S. Supreme Court and spent much of last year writing about abortion.
"I think that when abortion opponents complain about a bias in newsrooms against their cause, they're absolutely right," Bronner says.
But James Naughton, deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says that abortion opponents feel so passionately about the issue that they would criticize the media, no matter what was published or broadcast.
"They're seeing a conspiracy that doesn't exist," Naughton says.
Both Bronner and Naughton make valid points. Still, it is clear from examining coverage of abortion that the very language used to frame the abortion debate in much of the media implicitly favors the abortion rights side of the argument.
As in any debate, "the language is everything," says Douglas Gould, former vice president for communications at Planned Parenthood of America, and in the abortion debate, the media's language consistently embraces the rights of the woman (the primary focus of the abortion-rights advocates), not the fetus (the primary focus of abortion opponents):
When the networks broadcast an abortion story, the backdrop has often been the large word "abortion" - with the first "O" in the word stylized into the biological symbol for female. The networks could just as easily stylize the "O" to represent a womb, with a drawing of a fetus inside.
When Time magazine published a cover story on abortion last May, the cover was a drawing of a women; when Newsweek published a cover story on abortion two months later, its cover featured a photo of a pregnant woman. Neither cover depicted a fetus. (Of course, news magazines choose their covers in part to maximize possible newsstand sales. Women buy news magazines; fetuses don't.)
When The Washington Post wrote about anti-abortion legislation in Louisiana, it spoke of the state House of Representatives making a decision on "a woman's reproductive rights."
When the Los Angeles Times covered the same story, it referred to the proposed legislation as "the nation's harshest." That is the view of abortion-rights advocates; it is "harsh" toward women's rights. But abortion opponents regard the legislation as benevolent - toward the fetus.
The language used in coverage of the Louisiana legislation is not an anomaly. Virtually all the media refer to anti-abortion legislation as "restrictive." What is it "restricting"? The right of a woman to have an abortion. But abortion opponents would describe the legislation as "protective" - "protective" of the fetus.
Legislation regulating abortion is almost invariably referred to as "hurting" poor women the most, by making them travel to states where abortion is legal - a principal argument of abortion rights advocates. But the media never say that such legislation would "help" the fetuses of poor women the most by enabling them to develop into live babies - a principal argument of abortion opponents.
Why? Because the media have generally, if implicitly, accepted the abortion-rights view that there is no human life to be "helped" before birth. That is why the media use the term "fetus" (the preferred term of abortion-rights advocates), rather than "baby" or "unborn child" or "preborn child" (as abortion opponents prefer). Editors say "fetus" is medically correct, value-free and nonemotional. A "fetus" does not become a "baby" until it is born.
All true. But, as Joan Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee, says, "fetus" sounds like a "non-human glob," so it is easy to understand why abortion opponents complain that the consistent use of that word robs them of their most powerful image and argument. Moreover, to their growing chagrin, the media sometimes use "baby" when speaking of a fetus in a story that does not involve abortion.
"Semantics . . . are the weapons with which this civil war is being fought," Ellen Goodman wrote, and nowhere have the semantic weapons of the abortion-rights advocates been more effective than in the seemingly simple but extremely volatile issue of the labels the news media apply to each side.
Abortion opponents are often described as "conservatives;" abortion supporters are rarely labeled as "liberals."
Moreover:
The Associated Press, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Time magazine, among others, have referred to those who oppose abortion, " even in cases of rape and incest" (circumstances under which most people approve of abortion). But the media almost never refer to those who favor abortion rights " even in the final weeks of pregnancy" (circumstances under which most people oppose abortion).
Newsweek said last summer that under new abortion regulations, "Many women will be forced to seek out-of-state abortions - incurring travel expenses and losing time and income in the process." But abortion opponents argue that no one is "forced" to have an abortion and that Newsweek's statement is tantamount to saying that if guns were outlawed, "Many murderers would be `forced' to use knives."
Some news organizations routinely say that polls show that "most" Americans favor abortion. But what the polls really show is that Americans are enormously ambivalent about abortion, their answers depending on precisely how the question is phrased. Indeed, as Charlotte Taft, director of a women's health clinic in Dallas, said last year, "Americans favor abortion only in case of rape, incest and their own personal circumstance."
by CNB