Remember when the media ignored en masse the mass murderers/late term abortions of the monster Kermit Gosnell? Remember the empty seats at the trial? Remember the important stories that were never written?
In that highly newsworthy circumstance, the media knew what it didn’t want you to know.
But notice how quickly this same media spread the word–nay, breathlessly reported one unsubstantiated local Ireland story–that the bodies of long-dead babies were found discarded in a septic tank at a long closed home for unwed mothers run by nuns. Example, the Washington Post.
In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond.
Some of their children were not so fortunate. More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has perhaps now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.
One itty-bitty problem: It isn’t true.
From a commentary in Forbes by Eamonn Fingleton
Today the Irish Times has published a reader’s letter that has further undercut the story. Finbar McCormick, a professor of geography at Queen’s University Belfast, sharply admonished the media for describing the children’s last resting place as a septic tank. He added: “The structure as described is much more likely to be a shaft burial vault, a common method of burial used in the recent past and still used today in many parts of Europe…
The one “fact” that turned all this from a disturbing national story into a screaming global sensation is one that is almost certainly false.
The Post (which ran two stories on the “septic tank” babies) and other outlets have been forced to issue correctives.
Click here to sign up for daily pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
So we are left with an interesting question: Why would real murders of babies–that took place in the present day–be all but ignored, while a false report of disrespectfully discarded bodies from many decades ago be reported high profile internationally?
Answer: The former story reflected badly on abortion, so beloved by most in the media, while the latter validated their anti-Catholic bigotry–particularly their disdain for that church’s views toward sexual morality and pro-life activism.
This is one example of why the public’s trust in the media is in the, well, septic tank. They earn every ounce of our disdain.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
