Gosnell, & Silent, Spineless Reporting

Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

Why not?

Because America desperately needs them to become journalists. And not just any kind of journalists—we need them to become courageous, morally-governed, cultural commentators.

Why?

Because a good percentage of the current crop of reporters leading our major networks, magazines, and newspapers are spinelessly refusing to scream from the rooftops about one of the greatest humanitarian atrocities of our day: the murder of women and children by someone who took the Hippocratic Oath and promised to “do no harm.” Even Conor Friedersdorf, a columnist for the Atlantic, writes about Kermit Gosnell’s case: “I agree that the story has been undercovered, and I happen to be a working journalist…”

Someone tell me why this story hasn’t made the front-page news every day since Gosnell’s arrest on January 19, 2013? The pipeline. The legalization of marijuana. The sequestration. How are these issues outcompeting Gosnell for the front page?

Is there a more helpless, vulnerable segment of our society than newborn babies? Is there a group that needs our gentle, compassionate, and humane protection more than pregnant women? This “doctor” delivered children, and then killed them by snipping their spinal cords with scissors. In the process, he killed at least two mothers. Don’t take my word for it—here’s a quote from the grand jury report:

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.”

“The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.”

A man who kills women and children, and a society that can’t decide whether it’s newsworthy or not… in my opinion, that’s newsworthy!

For the love of God, let’s teach our children to write well, pay attention to culture, and then have the guts to report the truth. Let’s put pencils and pads of paper in their hands and then show them how to stand up for those who, because of the collective moral confusion of our society, will never have the chance to stand. If we do, perhaps the next generation will report the news without the blindness and bias of this one.