Wow -- even a major player in the MSM (USA Today) has now caught on to the extreme bias of the recent report which claimed that unborn kids feel no pain even in late abortions. After all, even though it was the once-prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association which printed the article, the discovery that the originators of the piece include an abortion mill director and other outspoken pro-abortion advocates...well, that kinda' soured the pie.
Of course, the JAMA should have caught on to the scam but being so firmly entrenched in its own bias towards abortion, it didn't bother to be objective. And, yes, the mainstream media should have checked the background of the piece before splashing it everywhere they could. They could at least have read the thing instead of relying on the article's headlines. They might then have noticed that the "study" was not based on any new scientific data at all but was merely rehashing stuff from old articles. But again, the MSM's enthusiasm for abortion (also strong) naturally clouded their judgment.
So why the semi-apologetic attitude shown by the USA Today article and even JAMA?
Why indeed. It was simply because the faithful "watchmen on the wall" of the alternative media were quick and well prepared to do the job the JAMA and the MSM should have done in the first place; namely, check the facts and report them. And with the numbers of Americans (and others) tuning out the MSM while turning on the conservative "new guard" media, the powers that be are increasingly feeling the pressure to respond.
No doubt about it; without the bloggers, the conservative columnists, the talk radio folks, et al -- the revised story in the USA Today would never have seen the light of day. So be encouraged...and keep telling the truth.
For more details on this story, checkout the recent posts of Jill Stanek and ProLifeBlogs.
Great post denny. Do you have a link for the USA Today article?
Um, have you ever heard of a review article? They're very common. Have you heard of peer review? It's the process by which articles are vetted by people other than their authors. You may not like the study's conclusions, and it may be wrong, but you need to criticize it on medical grounds, not on the ideological purity of its authors. And you need to know a little bit about how papers get published.
There is nothing wrong with questioning the presuppositions of an ideological position that is disguised as a "review article". Since when do review articles begin with a political context and authors who do not disclose their affiliations and potential source of bias? Why is it that the vetting process did not reveal the potential biases and political agenda of the authors?
Abortion is wrong period.