Ignoring Atrocities

            I was born 40 miles from Fenway Park and I've been a loyal fan of the Red Sox since I was 8 years old, oh so many years ago. The other evening I was watching a game and noticed that every pitch was being recorded on a strike zone grid in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. So I decided to keep score of the umpire's accuracy in calling balls and strikes. To my dismay, I found that the umpire made the right call less than 90% of the time. This led me to musing about something called judgment, not just the judgment of an umpire who could affect the outcome of a game, but more specifically about the judgment of our national media in not reporting news that has a direct bearing on our nation's moral character.

            There are two kinds of reporting in our media. One is opinion, the other news. Opinion is generally biased in one direction or another as it reflects the views of the writer or pundit. My writings, for example, reflect a conservative point of view and are markedly different from opinions offered by my liberal friends. But news should be news and not biased. And that should include all that is newsworthy, not just news that the source considers favorable to its point of view. More importantly, news organizations should not dismiss or exclude news that threatens their particular bias. They should report the facts and not make judgment calls on what constitutes news. A case in point is the Kermit Gosnell story.
            Dr. Gosnell is a monster. He has been performing late-term abortions since before Roe v. Wade in 1974. According to testimony at his trial, his butchery has taken the lives of more than 1,000 babies born alive. His methods are too gruesome to repeat here. I believe Gosnell will go straight to hell after his execution or the end of his life in prison. But the story here is not about Gosnell's judgment, but about the judgment of the news media that deliberately chose to ignore this story until Fox News and some radio talk-show hosts forced them to report on it.
            Was this because the mainstream media did not feel that, in their judgment, this story was  newsworthy? Or was it because it threatened to expose their bias?
            This wasn't a trivial story about balls and strikes, folks. This was a story about the extermination of a whole class of unwanted individuals. Real people. People who might all be alive today. People with unique talents contributing to society in a myriad of ways. People who had just as much a right to life as those who chose to deny it to them. This is a story about modern barbarism in the name of Choice.
            When decision-makers in the media avert their eyes to such unspeakable atrocity, they are just as guilty as those Germans who chose to look the other way as millions fueled ovens in their back yard.