Each year we are treated to new polling showing journalism as a profession falls in the public’s esteem somewhere between a third-degree rug burn and a debilitating brain freeze. And, as if like clockwork, we get a few “soul searching” opinion pieces and editorials.
Just as the the directors and actors of every big box-office bomb nowadays angrily blame the fans for their failures, the commentators in these pieces tend to blame the public for not understanding just how important their journalism is.
But just as one cannot argue an ex-girlfriend into loving you again, journalism will never earn back the trust of the public — at least not without significant changes.
To address the “significant changes” needed to attract a consistent audience again, you really only need to look back to what was written last week. And by “last week,” I don’t just mean the third full week of July — I mean the last seven days at any given moment. The rot in journalism runs a lot deeper than any one week or any one story.
Here’s a new favorite from the New York Times: “Nebraska Teen Who Used Pills to End Pregnancy Gets 90 Days in Jail.” Since most people can be counted on just to read headlines and skip the articles, the implication the editors of the Times wanted their audience to come away with was that this teenager is going to jail for having an abortion.
In fact, that’s not true, but you’d have to read to paragraph 16 of the article to understand that fully.
The piece opens with the implication this wasn’t an abortion story, but it’s deliberately obscured in the language of abortion. “A Nebraska teenager who used abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy,” it starts, “was sentenced on Thursday to 90 days in jail after she pleaded guilty earlier this year to illegally concealing human remains.”
If you read that far, you’re probably wondering what this “concealing human remains” part is all about. But you will have to read almost to the end to find out.
The next paragraph describes how the 19-year-old and her 42-year-old mother were discovered by authorities. “Facebook messages, which showed them discussing plans to end the pregnancy and ‘burn the evidence.’”
Note that “end the pregnancy” was listed first, even though that’s not even a crime and not what earned this teen a jail sentence.
The third paragraph states that “the mother had ordered abortion pills online and had given them to her daughter,” who was 17 at the time and already in her third trimester, meaning the baby would have been able to live outside the womb. This was a clear violation of Food and Drug Administration regulations, which state that abortion pills should be administered only in the first trimester.
But even so, this very medically dangerous and poor decision to use an abortion pill this way is not what got this girl into trouble.
Then, for a story written in New York about events that occurred in Nebraska, the Times quotes an associate law professor from the University of Pittsburgh. “This case is really sad because people resort to things like this when they’re really desperate, and the thing that makes people really desperate is abortion bans.”
That’s the perfect quote if you want to give the reader the wrong impression — which may be precisely why the Times reached out to someone so completely disconnected from the story.
As if to put more meat on the bones of an abortion-ban story, the Times writes, “According to prosecutors, Celeste Burgess used abortion pills long after the 10 weeks permitted by the Food and Drug Administration. Court records indicate that she was almost 30 weeks pregnant when she terminated the pregnancy — past the 23 to 24 weeks generally accepted as the point of viability, when a fetus would most likely be able to live outside the womb.”
Then you get to paragraph 16. “Prosecutors did not charge Celeste Burgess under Nebraska’s abortion law.” Yes, that’s right. A story that has been about abortion right up to that point finally comes right out and admits it was a bait-and-switch.
“She pleaded guilty in May to removing or concealing human skeletal remains, a felony. Prosecutors agreed to drop two misdemeanor charges against her: concealing a death and false reporting.”
She and her mother moved the body three times and set fire to it once before finally being caught. These details the Times causally mentions in the fifth-to-last paragraph.
The reality of the story makes you wonder why the Times would report it at all. The reason is the spin. They want to argue that Republicans have criminalized abortions and are even prosecuting women who have them. But the story is about criminal activity, not an abortion. The Times’s reporter and his or her editors had to know this, but someone made a choice to give readers the wrong impression because it fed a national political narrative they preferred.
So to sum up, if you want to know why the public distrusts the media so much, it’s because the media do so much to earn it.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).
