Did Bob Unruh learn anything about proper journalism in those three decades at the Associated Press that his boss, Joseph Farah, loves to tout? As we’ve documented, it appears not. The latest example of Unruh’s lack of journalistic standards is a Feb. 28 WorldNetDaily article that manages to be both egregiously slanted and remarkably ill-informed.
The subject of Unruh’s article is the possibility that President Obama will overturn a rule instituted by President Bush in December that allows “doctors, hospitals, and even receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments the right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable.” Unsurprisingly, Unruh paints this in the most dire terms possible, baselessly claiming that Obama is “attempt to overrule their rights of conscience” and “demand[ing] doctors participate in the abortion industry.”
Unruh also quotes critics of the proposed reversal, uncritically advancing their views that overturning the rule would mean “the closure of hospitals and clinics across America and a mass migration of physicians and their assistances to other careers.”
This demonstrates Unruh’s failure as a journalist. This claim is patently absurd on its face — the Bush rule has been in effect for only two months, and none of the sources Unruh quotes offers any evidence that doctors and other health professionals have entered the field because of the new ability to withhold, say, birth control on the basis on “conscience.”
Indeed, Unruh doesn’t even mention birth control — he doesn’t bother to quote any supporters of the reversal, who would have noted that the rule would allow a doctor who opposes birth control to refuse to prescribe contraception to a woman. The only medical issueUnruh mentions is the red-meat issue of abortion, as well as unsupported claims that “Medical students report changing career tracks away from obstetrics for fear of pressure to do abortions.”
This article is a biased mess because Unruh doesn’t care enough to gather both sides of the story — and he works for a “news” organization that doesn’t care about reporting facts to allow Unruh to get away with it. He, unfortunately is a hack, and Farah allows him to be one — indeed, pays him to be one.
It’s no wonder Unruh doesn’t work for the AP anymore — the biased and poorly reported stories he peddles at WND do not meet AP standards.