Media Outlets Ignore or Downplay Shooting at Pro-Life Office

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Aug 16, 2012   |   12:40PM   |   Washington, DC

Mainstream media outlets either ignored or downplayed the shooting at the Family Research Council yesterday. Tim Graham of the Media Research Center and Jill Stanek, a pro-life blogger, have compiled some of the “worst of” or “lack of” coverage.

From Tim Graham at Media Research Center:

ABC was the only broadcast network that offered a full story on the FRC office shooting on Wednesday night. They led with the story and gave it two and a half minutes.

On NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams gave the story just 17 seconds: “In Washington today, police say a man with a gun walked into the offices of the conservative lobbying group the Family Research Council, and opened fire. He never made it past the lobby. He shot a security guard in the arm before the guard was able to subdue him.”

On CBS Evening News, substitute anchor Bob Schieffer offered 20 seconds: “A gunman opened fire today at the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobbying group. The man shot a security guard in the arm before that guard and others tackled him, and he was arrested. Police say that the suspect made negative comment about the council’s work just before the shooting.”

Does anyone believe that under the same circumstances — hostile ideological shooter captured after security guard only shot in the arm — a conservative nut attacking a gay activist group or abortion advocacy group would draw just 20 seconds? (For one example, a quick Nexis search reminds me CBS This Morning offered a full story from Wichita on August 20, 1993, after late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller was shot in both arms.)

On both NBC and CBS, the FRC brief was followed by a full story promoting President Obama’s new deferral program for illegal alien “Dream Act” students. NBC gave that two minutes, CBS two minutes and fifty seconds.

From Jill Stanek:

Frightened for my friends, I began checking Google for news reports. Ten minutes later the first story popped up, stating an FRC security guard had been shot in the arm, and the shooter had been arrested. A bit relieved, I went ahead with a planned day trip, tuning in to news radio in the truck to keep up with the latest. Nada.

I switched to WLS radio, the Chicago ABC affiliate. More nada. I thought to myself had this been a shooting at a NARAL or GLAAD headquarters, or at a Planned Parenthood, the journalistic world would have stopped. But because FRC is conservative, a shooting wasn’t as big a deal.

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I waited for the mainstream media to connect Corkins to the homosexual activist community.

After all, to this day liberals link Scott Roeder, who killed late-term abortionist George Tiller in 2009, to Operation Rescue because “authorities found a Post-It note with Operation Rescue’s phone number in Roeder’s car,” quoting MSNBC as recently as August 13.

And Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards labeled Tiller’s murder as only one of “violent attacks by anti-choice extremists,” quoting from CNN.

And within hours of the Auroro, Colorado, theater shooting last month, ABC falsely linked the killer to the Tea Party.

So if Corkins actually worked at a homosexual organization, and it was during the time when that organization was actively promoting the defamation of Chick-Fil-A, and if on Facebook Corkin listed only two friends, one being David Mariner, executive director of The DC Center (who Mariner quickly defriended), well wow, surely MSM would promote Corkin as a poster child for homosexual violence, right?

No, of course not. Negative profiling by liberals and the media only goes one way.