WASHINGTON, D.C., April 17, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A left-wing media commentator has said what many pro-life activists long believed: that an overwhelmingly liberal media consciously chose not to cover the trial of Kermit Gosnell, because they feared it would undermine their political stance on abortion.
“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the Left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights,” said Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University professor known for his frequent appearance on Fox News. “Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the Left.”
Hill said he thought the captivity of media coverage to a “progressive” political agenda was a negative development but one that may be insurmountable.
“I think it’s a bad idea,” he said of the blackout. “I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.”
Hill was briefly fired from his stint as a commentator on “The O'Reilly Factor” after his admiration of Assata Shakur, a cop-killer who fled for refuge to Castro’s Cuba, became public. Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media then devoted a number of articles to Hill’s heroes, including Louis Farrakhan, Mumia Abu Jamal, and Fidel Castro. But he returned to the program in less than two months.
Mainstream media outlets from The Washington Post and CNN to MSNBC and Time were forced to cover the capital murder trial of Gosnell after last Friday's successful tweetfest garnered more than half-a-million mentions on Twitter and hundreds of thousands of uses of the #Gosnell hashtag.
A second Gosnell tweetfest is underway today.