Associated Press Misses Mark on Abortion Story, Revises After Pro-Life Concern
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 18, 2008
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The Associated Press finally covered the debate over abortion taking place within the presidential election, but one leading pro-life advocate says the news outlet misses the entire story. Billy Valentine, the vice president of Students for Life of America, also says the AP revised errors after his complaints.
AP covered news threads LifeNews.com has already profiled — a Barack Obama ad attacking John McCain and a McCain ad touting his support for stem cell research.
It also mentions the anti-Obama ad run by a woman who survived a botched late-term abortion pointing out his vote against providing medical care to infants like her.
But Valentine takes exception to some of the content in the AP article and some of what was left out.
He says the title of the story is slanted in Obama’s favor — "Obama casts light on McCain’s abortion stance" — even though Obama doesn’t take McCain on directly in his ad but employs an actress.
"He doesn’t directly do it in either of his ads. That’s not Obama doing it himself," Valentine says.
That contrasts with McCain, who has specifically called Obama on the carpet for his extreme position favoring abortion for any reason throughout pregnancy and funded with taxpayer dollars.
"McCain, on the other hand, has specifically called out Obama for his support of what amounts to infanticide and partial-birth abortion. Neither instance was mentioned in [the] article, nor was either issue talked about," the pro-life student leader says.
Valentine also questions the part of the AP story saying Obama "has not shied away from using abortion to reach out to independents and moderate Republicans."
"In fact, Obama has shied away," Valentine contends.
"He won’t talk about the issue directly. At the Saddleback forum, he wouldn’t even say when the unborn get human rights. His ads don’t feature his voice. He chooses to use scare tactics instead," he says.
He also points out the contradiction in the AP story, where the writer also claims Obama is using "low profile" radio ads and that abortion has "largely taken a back seat this presidential campaign."
"Which one is it?" Valentine asks.
The AP writer, Liz Sidoti, appears to have corrected or updated her story to respond to some of Valentine’s concerns, that he emailed to AP after the initial article came out online.
Sidoti revised the story to indicate that Obama’s running mate, pro-abortion Sen. Joe Biden, voted for the partial-birth abortion ban while Obama opposed it.
She also removed a reference to Sarah Palin’s pro-life views as "ultraconservative" and changed it to "conservative."
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