If a liberal Democrat tells the right sort of lie — the sort that appeals to the journalistic class’s ideology and prejudices — then she not only can get away with it, she can expect to see it amplified by the major media.
And only if conservatives push back hard enough — relentlessly, with a barrage of facts — then maybe, eventually, they can get a few outlets to carry their side. Sometimes even a correction.
This is how the political media works in America, and it’s been this way for years. This dynamic, far more than any negative campaign by Fox News or Donald Trump, is central to why conservatives distrust and dislike the major media, and have since even before Trump or Fox News was a thing.
Consider the recent attack by Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh, in Senate testimony, was asked about Priests for Life v. HHS, in which the pro-life group objected to the Obama administration’s contraception-coverage mandate.
Kavanaugh clearly explained the group’s objection: “They said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objected to.”
Planned Parenthood responded, saying falsely, “Kavanaugh referred to birth control ― something more than 95 percent of women use in their lifetime ― as an ‘abortion-inducing drug.’”
Harris piled on, echoing Planned Parenthood’s objection, and releasing a deceptively edited video, omitting the words “they said” so that it looked like Kavanaugh was expressing his own personal opinion. Kavanaugh, however, was accurately describing the argument made by Priests for Life, who in their brief to his court wrote about three categories of products they didn’t want to provide or facilitate access to: “abortion-inducing products, contraceptives, and sterilization.”
If you believed Planned Parenthood and Harris, you were misled into thinking: (1) the objection was Kavanaugh’s; (2) all contraceptives were being described as “abortion-inducing;” (3) no contraceptives can be soundly considered “abortion-inducing.” All three points are false, and all three were uncritically parroted by some outlets, and slyly bolstered by others.
CNN, for one, tweeted out precisely Harris’s version of the story: “Brett Kavanaugh’s views on birth control drew scrutiny after he referred to contraceptives as ‘abortion-inducing drugs.’”
New York magazine did the same: “Brett Kavanaugh Calls Birth Control ‘Abortion Inducing Drugs.‘” It’s enough to make you doubt whether anyone at that hallowed magazine bothered to watch the hearings. The writer of this piece was Irin Carmon, who during the 2012 election wrote that Rick Santorum wants to “send condom police into people’s bedrooms.” Then NBC News hired her as a “news reporter.” Now she’s back to being a straight-opinion writer for New York. (Note that this career path is typical for liberals, but not for conservatives.)
The New York Times covered this with an article headlined, “Science Does Not Support Claims That Contraceptives Are ‘Abortion-Inducing,’” thus addressing a claim that neither Kavanaugh nor the plaintiffs he was citing ever made — that all contraceptives induce abortions.
In that piece, the Times flatly asserted that referring to morning-after contraceptives as “abortion-inducing” “is not supported by scientific evidence,” as is a canard used by “some anti-abortion religious groups.”
Here, the Times, Planned Parenthood, and Kamala Harris are all on the same side of a very contentious and debatable issue. It makes sense for Harris and the abortion lobby to be on the same side, but the Times presents itself as a neutral arbiter.
But a neutral arbiter wouldn’t lead readers to believe that morning-after “contraceptives” don’t cause abortions. First, it’s scientifically sound — if not yet consensus — to believe that morning-after pills can prevent a zygote (a unique life made from the joining of sperm and egg) from implanting. A 2014 study printed in the journal Reproductive Science concluded that the active ingredient in morning-after pills “succeeds in preventing the clinical appearance of pregnancies mainly by its negative effects on endometrial receptivity, which is a postfertilization mechanism,” [emphasis added].
Plenty of other studies have found the same thing. Others disagree, however. It’s a disputed point, but the neutral arbiters present it as settled.
Second is the question of whether causing the death of a zygote counts as inducing an abortion. The Times would have you believe that it doesn’t count, because pregnancy doesn’t begin until implantation. That’s also a very debatable view. By a 2-to-1 ratio, most obstetricians in a 2011 poll said that pregnancy begins at conception, meaning a drug that prevents implantation is ending a pregnancy — thus inducing abortion. “Most of the doctors,” a 2011 article about the survey, “57 out of every 100, said that pregnancy begins at conception, while 28 out of every 100 said it begins at implantation.”
Planned Parenthood launched their deceptive attack on Thursday. CNN and other outlets parroted it in tweets or tried to bolster it throughout the day Friday and then throughout the weekend. Conservative writers like John McCormack at The Weekly Standard (the Washington Examiner’s sister publication) spent the weekend hammering away that this was doubly or triply a lie.
Finally, at the end of the day Monday — four days after Kamala Harris and Planned Parenthood had sent their lies flying around the world — Politifact finally corrected one of the lies, pointing out that they were falsely attributing a litigant’s views to Kavanaugh himself.
It’s not that conservatives never can win and liberals never can get called out. It’s that debating issues and even clear facts in the media, for conservatives, is always an away game, and they start out a few runs behind.
