Before today's annual anti-choice March for Life had begun, Fox talkers were off and running with the annual right-wing whine about how the march gets scant coverage from the liberal media - a meme that dovetails nicely with Fox's ongoing mainstream-media bashing. And it must be true because Donald Trump says so, too!
On this morning's Fox & Friends, Ainsley Earhardt introduced the requisite pro-life complaint about how the media ignores those who oppose abortion. After providing background on today's anti-abortion march, she framed the Fox message with the question, "Will the mainstream media give this pro-life event as much coverage as last weekend's Women's March?" In order to provide further validation for the meme, she answered the question: "President Trump doesn't think so." She played video of Trump's statement which, of course, was all about bashing the mainstream media - a popular Fox sport.
After Earhardt introduced Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, she cited statistics on last year's coverage of the March for Life on the three major news outlets, in comparison to their coverage of last week's Women's Marches - stats which seem (her number was slightly off) to have been obtained from an article on the right wing, anti-choice media watchdog Newsbusters.
In response to her question of whether this year's coverage will be the same as last year's, Hawkins noted that Trump "has put a lot of pressure on the mainstream media to be out there today." So she was "looking forward to seeing all of them out there." She then complained about what little coverage they traditionally get, but expressed confidence that this year it will be different.
The rest of the interview was spent in defense of the anti-choice position and the promotion of fake data about how millennials are overwhelmingly pro-life. In fact, recent Pew data says otherwise. 18-29 year olds favor legality of abortion in all/most cases by 61%.
But Earhardt said that she was "very proud of" Hawkins.
Later, on America's Newsroom, Fox's anti-choice propagandist, Shannon Bream, picked up the meme. She quickly informed us that Trump has been "slamming the media, accusing news outlets of underestimating the march turnout." She played the same media-bashing Trump video that was played on Fox & Friends.
Bream's interview was with Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life. Mancini was ecstatic that Vice President Mike Pence will be speaking at the march. She defended the anti-choice position as "pro-woman" and praised the new administration for "respecting the inherent dignity of the human person from conception to natural death."
Bream noted that those who are pro-choice are afraid of losing their rights and referenced a recent Atlantic Monthly article about how ultrasounds are being used as an anti-choice tool. Never wasting an opportunity to push pro-life propaganda, she mentioned a 1980's study, described in the article, which claimed that sonograms deter abortions. She didn't say that the article also notes that the "evidence suggests the opposite." Mancini claimed science "is on the side of life."
Cohost Bill Hemmer wrapped it up with a nice propaganda bow. He said to Bream, "There will be a lot of focus, too ... when you compare the amount of media attention for the march, last week on Saturday, to what's happening today."
So Fox was whining about coverage of the anti-abortion march while their own coverage of last Saturday's Women's Marches was very limited. So much for fair and balanced?
Watch both propaganda segments below, from today's Fox & Friends and America's Newsroom.
And it’s a no-brainer that this event doesn’t merit wide coverage. It’s one of many single-issue marches that happen in DC every month, and it’s one that is particularly focused on an angry, hateful group. There are also marches about police violence, about violence against women, about the environment, etc. The only time these marches get attention is when you see massive crowds as we did on the 21st. A march in the tens of thousands is fine for the organizers of that march – if in fact they even got to that number. A march in the hundreds of thousands or higher is a different matter – and when you multiply that by all the cities in which marches were held a week ago, it becomes clear why that story was appropriate to cover.
If Fox News wishes to make an issue about the media not covering this anti-choice event, then they must be agreeing to cover all the other marches and rallies that regularly happen in DC. Something tells me that they don’t wish to cover those – they only want everyone to cover the little rally that they supported. Once again, hypocrisy and nonsense. And bullying to try to cover it over.
An anti abortion stance is the fig leaf they need to otherwise be totally without empathy toward their fellow mankind. Jesus would not recognize them as Christian.