Report: LifeNews Led Gosnell TwitterFest Forcing Media Coverage

National   |   LifeNews   |   Apr 16, 2013   |   4:13PM   |   Washington, DC

Last week, pro-life advocates took to Twitter to highlight the lack of coverage given to the Kermit Gosnell murder trial.

A new report issued today indicates LifeNews led the way — with our twitter account serving as the most-closely associated account to tweets related to Gosnell and his trial for murdering babies in grisly infanticides.

William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor and Cornell Law School, issued a report on the Twitter activity yesterday:

There was a lot of Twitter activity trying to drive the mainstream media to cover the trial of Kermit Gosnell.

The Washington Post and NY Times, among others, now will be sending reporters to the trial, although denying that any pro-abortion bias caused them to shy away.

The infographic below, provided to me by former Legal Insurrection contributor Matthew Knee now with Target Point Consulting, illustrates the surge of Twitter activity last week and into the weekend. Here are some sections, with the full infographic below:

Last week, conservatives flooded Twitter to demand that the mainstream media cover the Dr. Kermit Gosnell infanticide trial. They saw rapid success, causing mainstream media coverage of the Gosnell trial to triple and non-Twitter social media and web/blog coverage to quadruple from Thursday to Friday. Additionally, Gosnell was tweeted about twice as much as President Obama on Friday, and sustained an advantage through Saturday.

The first graph below shows the massive increase in the number of Gosnell mentions on Twitter:

The second shows the LifeNews Twitter account belonging to Editor Steven Ertelt was the one most closely associated with Gosnell tweets — beating various keywords, conservative activists and even mainstream media outlets like ABC and CNN.

The Gosnell TweetFest will continue on Wednesday.

“The tweet-up was a huge success and did what it was intended to do, and that was to show the mainstream media that there is a huge interest in seeing coverage of the Gosnell murder trial. We hoped that the tweet-up would pressure the media to cover the story,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue, who sponsored the event along with Bryan Kemper of Stand True and Andy Moore, creator of AbortionWiki.org.

About 10,000 people on Facebook signed up to participate, but the event took off, dominating the trending chart, which is no easy task.

“I couldn’t hit the ‘new tweets’ button fast enough. At one point there were about 100 tweets coming as fast as I could push the refresh button,” said Newman.

The tweet up helped bypass the mainstream media and educate vast numbers of twitter users that otherwise would never have heard of Gosnell, and in doing so prompted several media outlets to begin publishing stories, many for the first time. Anderson Cooper of CNN broadcasted a noteworthy segment on the Gosnell story that was remarkably fair considering the Cooper’s leftist leanings.

So successful was Friday’s Twitter event that another is planned for Wednesday, April 17. We are asking for everyone to tweet under #Gosnell.