Friday, August 21, 2009

Leroy Carhart or Prince Valiant? Newsweek Treats Late-Term Abortionist as an Undaunted Hero.

Well, it turns out that the young woman who interviewed us outside Leroy Carhart's abortion mill last June did work for Newsweek after all. But the article that she just had published in that rag suggests she's not really very much of a reporter -- more like a sycophantic agent for Carhart.

Well, actually, if Leroy Carhart himself would have written this puff piece (it's title is "The Abortion Evangelist") it couldn't have been as syrupy, as extreme or as unprofessionally mindless as it turned out. Indeed, it's so abjectly adulatory that it works against its purpose; even readers who call themselves "pro-choice" are going to be insulted with how Sarah Kliff tries to make late-term abortion a sacrament with Carhart as its saintly hero.

And the other side of Carhart and his sleazy abortion business? Completely ignored. What Kliff learned from us in a prolonged interview and another in which she spoke to the director of the pro-life pregnancy center across the street was rejected outright. There was no room for alternative views, for fact-checking of any sort, for any sense of balance at all in her hagiography.

Poor reporting? This is about as bad as it gets.