Tim Graham complains over in The Corner:
IT'S CHRISTIAN TERRORIST DAY [Tim Graham]
Bring up ABCNews.com today and you see the graphic "Called to Violence" and the headline "In God's Name." The summary of the story: "An anti-abortion activist is following the example of violent Islamic fundamentalists, telling those who share his views to become 'Christian terrorists.'" There's also a story headlined "Global Abortion War," which rails against the "Mexico City policy" banning U.S. funds for international abortion promotion. Some objective Web site.
Yes, some Christian nut is telling others to blow up abortion clinics, but the IMPORTANT issue is that ABCNews isn't being fair and balanced. At least according to Tim Graham.
I went over to ABC News to read
the first story and while one can question whether this is front page news, I think it's a more than fair story. Just look at the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth paragraphs:
There is some question among academics and others who follow extremist movements in the United States about how seriously to take the rhetoric, particularly because none believe that such views are shared by more than, at most, a few hundred people.
"The hard-liners have become more and more hard-line, and I think they've lost most of their appeal even with the Christian right, which might share some of their views," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist movements.
It is not a view likely to be shared by more than a handful of the thousands expected to march today in Washington in the March for Life, an annual protest on the anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal nationwide.
Mainstream anti-abortion groups such as the National Right to Life Committee have praised the arrests and convictions of people involved in violence against abortion providers and released a statement that the group "strongly opposes any use of violence as a means of stopping the violence that has killed more than 43 million unborn children since 1973."
If this were a hit piece, this would probably appear near the end of the story, and certainly not on the first page of a five-page story.
Let me repeat: there are Christian terrorists who want to blow up abortion clinics. And yet some people think that pointing this out is evidence of media bias. I think media bias exists, but this isn't an example of it. Somehow I don't think these people complaining would do the same about
eco-terrorists.
