If the media want conservatives to stop accusing them of left-wing bias, perhaps they should stop giving crystal clear examples of that bias.
The latest such example comes from Kate Smith. Smith covered abortion and pro-life issues for CBS News for three years. She was previously a reporter for Bloomberg and the Financial Times. But now, miraculously, Smith has joined Planned Parenthood as its senior director of news content.
Smith announced that she had resigned from CBS News in July of last year and was candid about having to dance around her abortion views while pretending to be a journalist. “Now that I’m not a reporter I can be candid about my own opinions on reproductive rights. I’ll say this: With or without Roe v Wade access to abortion is disappearing across the South and Midwest for low income women. And it’s happening more or less under the radar,” Smith tweeted. National Review noted that while employed as a journalist at CBS News, “Smith described herself in her Twitter bio as a reporter covering ‘abortion access,’ a political euphemism used nearly exclusively by abortion-rights activists and advocacy organizations.”
Almost instantly upon resigning from CBS News, Smith’s Twitter feed was full of dedicated pro-abortion narratives about fetal heartbeat bills. While at CBS News, she framed Texas’s abortion law as the “so-called heartbeat” bill.
Smith had already adopted the language and euphemisms of the pro-abortion Left while posing as a neutral reporter simply sitting down for interviews. As National Review also notes, “When Alexis McGill-Johnson became acting president of Planned Parenthood last summer, her first public interview went to — who else? — Kate Smith, who opened their conversation with a broad smile and a hearty, ‘Congratulations on the new job!'”
The issue at hand is not abortion. There are plenty of other talented experts and writers on the subject of life and ending life. Rather, it is how Smith’s move sheds light on the often extreme internal bias of journalists. Planned Parenthood has spent enormous blood and treasure locking up the national media in its favor, once even offering the Maggie Awards for journalists. These recognize “exceptional achievement by the media in presentation and coverage of reproductive rights and health care issues, including contraception, sexuality education, teen pregnancy, abortion, and international family planning.” The awards were terminated early in 2015.
Perhaps the awards were too much work. After all, journalists seem happy to peddle Planned Parenthood’s talking points willingly or just join their organization altogether. At the same time, organizations have pushed pro-life reporting out of the establishment media, refusing to so much as hire any unbiased reporter to cover what amounts to 49% of the country.
So, here’s a hearty congratulations to Kate Smith. She spent many years in the field of supposed neutral reporting. She is now in the service of her true passion: propagandizing for abortion.
Stephen L. Miller has written for National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News and hosts the Versus Media podcast. He can be found on Twitter @redsteeze.
