When gun owners recently organized a peaceful protest of extreme gun control proposals, an NBC News reporter called it a “white nationalist” rally.
When pro-life Catholic school students wore Make America Great Again hats on the National Mall last year and were accosted by a racist hate group and anti-Catholic con man Nathan Philips, the Washington Post smeared the students, reporting without any reliable sources or evidence that the group of students had taunted Philips and blocked his path. Other reporters and commentators gleefully piled on with their own lies.
The New York Times falsely declared “Viral Video Shows Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Surrounding Native Elder.”
Robby Soave at Reason sums up the awful coverage:
Then the real pile-on started. One popular viral anti-Catholic-school Twitter thread accused the school of being anti-woman and anti-gay. Others claimed to have pictures of students in blackface, or holding up white power symbols. NBC News carried a piece headlined, “Gay valedictorian banned from speaking at Covington graduation ‘not surprised’ by D.C. controversy,” a headline that might make you think the student graduated from, was barred from speaking at, or was the valedictorian at Covington Catholic. The student, in fact, never went to Covington Catholic.
Most of these smears weren’t done out of dishonesty but out of a sloppiness that comes from confirmation bias. Throughout, the liberal commentators and national reporters were displaying, to varying degrees, their deep dislike of Catholic schools, pro-lifers, and white Trump-supporting males — and their willingness to believe anything bad about such folks.
So how will this same press (it sure hasn’t improved in a year) cover the March for Life today? Which Catholic school or pro-lifer will they target?
Given the prevailing ideology among journalists, there is a lot for them to hate in marchers. First of all, basically every reporter and editor at the biggest news outlets favor liberal abortion laws. No honest journalist will disagree. That’s why they do things like refuse to call it the “March for Life,” but instead call it “The March Against Abortion Rights,” which is not its name.
But there are deeper cultural issues here, as the Covington Catholic episode showed. Many of the marchers are from Catholic schools. Some of those schools are all-male or all-female, which clashes with the current push to dissolve all differences between boys and girls.
Some of those Catholic schools probably have codes of conduct that include such unpopular ideas as forbidding premarital sex or gay sex. Perhaps this religious school teaches the story of Noah’s Ark, which is to some in the elite media, a sign of deplorability.
There are a million reasons that your average reporter will hate your average pro-life marcher. Let’s see if the media can contain their hatred for a day and limit themselves to the facts.
