Some people – generally those who openly identify with what is nebulously called “the left,” think it’s an old chestnut that there’s a “liberal bias” in mainstream media. That claim, they might suppose, is just a case of whining conservatives who don’t like the media telling it like it is. Anyone can pontificate on generalities. I’d rather give you an example.
This time the credit goes to the Verum Serum blog (a fantastic blog I have recently discovered) for bringing this example to my attention. Remember George Tiller? He was an abortionist who carried out very late term abortions – literally killing babies at a point in their lives where other babies of the same age were being delivered in maternity wards. He was shot dead by a man who opposed what he was doing, and he became the darling of the media for a while. He served, in the minds of many, largely thanks to this coverage, as a reminder of the dangerous “right wing” ideology simmering beneath the surface of the pro-life movement, and his death was used as a justification for accusations against conservatives as being “neo Nazis,” some pro-choicers going as far as to advocate killing pro-lifers and their families in retribution to even things up a little.
It’s likely that you had heard of George Tiller. Now think fast – who is Jim Pouillon?
Unless you already had a special interest in the abortion issue (or you have read or heard comments about him from someone who has such an interest), I’m pretty certain that you don’t know who Jim Pouillon is. He was a pro life advocate who was shot dead for holding a sign. Apparently his message in defence of the unborn irritated somebody.
Mainstream media outlets Time, the LA Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, combined, gave the death of George Tiller a total of sixty separate pieces of writing, using up 46,556 words. That’s the size of a master’s thesis. By contrast, these same media outlets printed twelve stories that mentioned the shooting of Jim Pouillon (Time included none at all, compared with at least nine stories on George Tiller’s shooting), using up 5,339 words. Comparing this murder to the murder of George Tiller In coverage space, that’s a ratio of about 1:8.7. These media outlets thought that it was almost nine times more important to make sure you knew about an abortionist being shot than to tell you about the murder of a pro-lifer. In the LA Times and Washington post the average was even worse, a 1:20 ratio.
This is to say nothing of the intensely negative stance taken towards Poullion (a stance bordering on depicting the man as more or less deserving what he got) with the overflowing admiration for Tiller. These stats alone say nothing about the way that such stories recalled past acts of violence against abortionists or abortion clinics, but are completely silent on any other acts of aggression towards pro lifers. When Mr Pouillon was shot dead in the street, no newspaper implied that it was time for pro choice advocates to “go into damage control mode.”
John’s comments from Verum Serum are so apt (bold and italtics are mine):
It’s impossible to look at the numbers, not to mention the tone of the coverage itself, and avoid the obvious conclusion that the press has a dog in this fight. The reporters writing these stories are nearly all pro-choice. So are the editors assigning the stories and writing the headlines. As a result, right-wing violence garners a lot more media coverage. It’s not a conspiracy, just confirmation bias in action.
And it extends far beyond this story. Did you know that a Crisis Pregnancy Center in Arizona was burned out just before Christmas? Probably not since not a single major media outlet covered the story. But if someone sets fire to an abortion clinic you can bet it will be national news.
Sadly, the MSM’s story selection eventually forms a kind of conventional wisdom, one that suggests “right-wing” is the natural prefix for “extremism.” In contrast, examples of left-wing violence are just a blip, a local crime story with no national implications worth mentioning if the story is mentioned at all.
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- Pro choicer advocates murdering pro-lifers
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Tags: abortion, bias, media
I think that the media, in general, is left leaning. Less so in the US than here in NZ. I’m not even going to try to defend that.
But something that doesn’t come through in your comparison of the two murders is that Harlan Drake, the guy who shot Pouillon, also shot another man, Michael Fuoss that same day. I’ve had a look at a number of articles from around the trial and it seems to me the fundamental difference between the two cases you put forward is one doesn’t seem to be about the issue of abortion. Harlan Drake, who a forensic psychiatrist said suffered from “severe psychosis”, appears to have been working his way through a list of people he thought had wronged his mother in some way. He was stopped before he got to a third man. Perhaps Pouillon was murdered merely because his big picture of an aborted foetus has offended or sickened Harlan’s mother.
When I do a search on Google for ‘Harlan Drake’ I get a lot of results for ‘anti-abortion shooter’ and none for ‘gravel pit owner shooter’. So, if anything, the media seems to have focussed on the more attention-getting abortion aspect but I think that Pouillon may well have just been the wrong guy holding the wrong gruesome picture at the wrong time.
The pattern we see here is that the media focuses on any link to the abortion issue but that the Harlan Drake case was not so obviously about abortion and more about a big, dumb, unhinged truck driver.
I wasn’t aware of the murder of Tiller either and know nothing about it. But I wouldn’t be surprise if his murderer was unhinged too. Unhinged people tend to attach themselves to all kinds of causes.
I agree that, especially here in NZ, the media is left-leaning. But I think you are not necessarily comparing apples with apples in these two cases given that one wasn’t really about the issue of abortion.
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Damian, I believe you’re minimising the way the issue was treated differently, especially (but not necessarily limited to) the treatment given to the victims by the press after their deaths, and also because of the wider way that incidents are reported (or not) as in the case of the crisis pregnancy centre that was torched but not spoken of as the media would speak of an abortion clinic arson.
I think this minimisation is just the kind of thing that would be done by the media outlets that I’m observing.
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Dude, I’m not minimising anything. I’m explaining why it might appear minimised.
P1. The media jumps on anything abortion related, left or right.
P2. The Pouillon murder wasn’t really about abortion, the Tiller one was.
C. The Pouillon murder didn’t get as much coverage as the Tiller one.
Perhaps the media *does* give more space to the left. But this case isn’t going to prove it either way because, as I said, you’re not comparing apples with apples.
As an aside, I’ve been looking further into the people involved in these cases and just about everyone seems to have histories of mental illness. It makes me sad. There are a lot of ill people out there. The US seems to be brimming with them.
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Damian, I believe that you are minimising it by smoothing over relevant details in differences over how the reporting was done (e.g. not merely over the fact that one was more popular, but how each case was reported when it was reported.
Comparing these two cases and the treatment they received in mainstream meadia (not Google) is very instructive. This case is most certainly a symptom of the wider problem.
And of course, clearly it’s a case of apples vs apples. One of the murder victims was a caring, wonderful, admirable, praiseworthy, upstanding abortion doctor for whom many moving tributes were published. The other was a bigoted rabble rouser who had it coming (the papers said so!). So clearly the cases are different.
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Oh, do you mean The O’Reily Factor (America’s #1 cable news show) calling him “Tiller the baby killer” in at least 28 episodes prior to his murder?
And, guess what, Pouillon really *did* have problems.
I hate it that you are trying to reduce this to a simple, blinkered, black-and-white case Glenn. It’s the tactics of someone not really interested in dialogue or truth. Or of someone not quite able to accept that the world is full of grey areas.
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(correction: he was called “Tiller the baby killer” on The O’Reily Factor and was talked about in at least 28 episodes prior to his death.)
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“Oh, do you mean The O’Reily Factor (America’s #1 cable news show) calling him “Tiller the baby killer” in at least 28 episodes prior to his murder?”
No… how could I possibly mean that when I’m talking about the amount and type of coverage given to his death by mainstream media?
As for who is trying to be “black and white,” I think someone’s essentially saying “move along, there’s absolutely nothing to see here” in a rather black and white way (yes, I mean you). But it s not clear what I’m supposedly being “black and white” about, allowing for no shades of grey. I thionk that was just a rhetorical device to paint me as a bit of a fundie. What, exactly, am I unwilling to allow shades of grey about?
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Tiller *did* kill. Was the only person to kill babies so close to term.
On the other hand, we have a guy with a sign, killed because he was holding that sign.
Yes, he may have been a really nasty guy (though his daughters apparently disagree with the son) but it was *just* a sign, expressing a point of view – that’s it’s wrong to kill the unborn.
So your “P2″ is wrong. But it is anyway – this shooting would have reci3eved so much coverage because it included abortion. It’d have been a local story only if he’d just been shot crossing the road.
If we believe their critics, both men were immoral – one for harassment, the other for mass murder.
The bias here is which critics are believed.
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Scrubone, I think you’re right. The whole “but the person who shot the pro-lifer didn’t say it was about abortion, it was because he was sick, that the guy had a pro-life sign is a coincidence… etc” is quite misguided.
Firstly that attempt to push the issue away is misguided because of the unlikelihood that Pouillon would have been shot in another context, but secondly – and you touch on this – if Tiller were at home having breakfast and got shot in a drive-by, people would still say it was about abortion, because it was Tiller, and again the case would be treated as evidence of the persistent and widespread violent tendencies of the conservative right.
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Speaking of abortion, there was recently a debate between Alan Shlemond and Cecili Chadwick on this issue. (Part 1 of 9 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yeaRok0nPE – the other parts are available too).
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