Dina sent me the latest on this story, from the UK Daily Mail.
Excerpt:
A medical school graduate has given a graphic account of working at a Philadelphia abortion clinic and how he routinely saw babies born alive and then killed with scissors
Stephen Massof, 50, of Pittsburgh, was giving evidence at the trial of his former boss Kermit Gosnell on Thursday.
Gosnell, 72, is accused of killing seven live babies at the Philadelphia Women’s Medical Society clinic and a woman who was administered too much anesthesia.
[…]Massof, who is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to the murder of two newborns at the clinic, revealed Thursday that he witnessed an abortion at 26 weeks – two weeks beyond the 24-week limit in the state.
He also claimed he saw about 100 babies born alive and then ‘snipped’ with surgical scissors in the back of the neck, to ensure their ‘demise’.
He also spoke of the gruesome scenes at the clinic which was allegedly found dirty and rundown with rusting surgical instruments.
‘It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place. It is literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body,’ he told NBC.
He also alleges the clinic’s ultrasound machine was manipulated to make fetuses appear smaller and therefore younger.
[…]Prosecutors allege Gosnell took more than $1 million a year at the clinic where women were charged up to $3,000 for an abortion.
David Freddoso has a column in the Washington Examiner on the media coverage of the Gosnell trial, which has been very different from the media’s coverage of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Excerpt:
Whatever one’s position on gun control, the appropriately heavy coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre at least served a public purpose by starting a discussion about mass shootings.
At its most thoughtful, the debate considered what measures might have prevented the massacre and which could be squared with Americans’ constitutional rights.
At its worst, the debate suffered from media cheerleading for panic gun control legislation — as in, “pass something, anything!” — including but not limited to such left-leaning figures as CNN’s Piers Morgan.
In stark contrast, television coverage of Gosnell’s trial has been “hard to find,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan put it very charitably last Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
In fact, not counting Noonan’s allusion, Gosnell’s case has not been mentioned even once on any of the three major networks in the last month (his trial began March 18).
It has received only seven mentions on cable television since it began, one on CNN and six on Fox News. In print, Gosnell’s case has been largely ignored outside of local media outlets in Pennsylvania and Delaware.
It’s not as though there isn’t an obvious connection between the Gosnell case and public policy. Legislators in some states (including Pennsylvania and now Alabama) have acted since Gosnell’s arrest to crack down on the next abortion quack.
The media have collectively and perhaps deliberately failed to draw the obvious connection between the two stories.
I think that the differences in the levels of coverage is useful to show that media bias is not always done by biased reporting. It can also be just the decision of what to report on. You can read my previous post on the peer-reviewed studies that document left-wing media bias.
