We’ve shown how the Media Research Center cheered the Arizona Supreme Court’s extremist stance in upholding an 1864 law — made before Arizona was even a state — banning nearly all abortions there, but was upset that non-right-wing media reported points of view it didn’t want reported. That attitude continued in an April 13 post by Alex Christy:
NBC correspondent Dana Griffin suited up for Team Abortion on Saturday’s edition of Today. Griffin claimed that the issue goes “beyond politics for women” and embraced all the activist premises when she asked the petitioner of the Arizona Supreme Court case if “women should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies.”
Griffin began by noting Vice President Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s responses to the ruling. On Trump, Griffin quoted him as posting on Truth Social, “’ the Supreme Court in Arizona went too far’ and ‘we must ideally have the three exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother,’” but she also added some further editorializing that Harris did not get “But the issue of abortion access goes beyond politics for women.”
It could be said that protecting the unborn goes beyond politics as well, but Griffin did not show pro-lifers the same courtesy. What she did show was an unidentified woman claiming she experienced “disbelief” and “anger” at the ruling. Griffin further reported that “Dr. Jill Gibson said patients were shocked and confused.”
Christy is invoking the ol’ Depiction-Equals-Approval Fallacy — a ConWeb staple used to falsely portray a news outlet airing a particular viewpoint as an endorsement of that viewpoint. Ultimately, Christy is angry that NBC didn’t act like Fox News and stick to approved right-wing narratives on the issue.
The other thing the MRC wants to do with this story is downplay the idea that right-wing extremism on abortion benefits Joe Biden’s re-election. Clay Waters served up that complaint in an April 14 post:
Abortion is back in the news with a vengeance, after the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated a Civil War era ban on abortion and candidate Donald Trump reacted with a moderate, federalist stance on abortion, disappointing some in the pro-life movement and making him an unfair figure of mockery in the mainstream press.
Friday’s episode of public television’s weekly roundtable panel Washington Week with The Atlantic was dominated by abortion politics as a lifesaver for the Democrats (if not for the victims of abortion).
[…]As usual, the journalists were unanimously liberal. National Public Radio political editor Domenico Montanaro touted Republicans had lost “special election after special election” on abortion and lamented “the chaos that has ensued with women not having access to reproductive rights in — millions of women across the South in particular, this chaotic sort of patchwork of abortion laws across the country, that’s made it really, really difficult.”
PBS NewsHour political reporter Lisa Desjardins said Trump showed he wasn’t worried about his base, “he’s not worried about all of those hard-right evangelicals.” Susan Glasser of The New Yorker said Trump can’t deny he was responsible for all this, “he has taken credit so many times for dismantling Roe.”
Waters went on to label those right-wing laws as “supposedly extremist,” though he offered no evidence that they weren’t. Waters offered more of this in another April 14 post:
The PBS NewsHour led its Tuesday evening newscast with the week’s big issue: abortion, an issue of such apparent import (and perceived advantage to the Democratic Party in November) that both anchors took a biased crack at it before the segment itself.
[…]After a soundbite from Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs saying the “abortion ban is extreme and hurts women,” Bennett introduced journalist Carter Sherman, who writes from the United States for the left-wing UK paper The Guardian about (ahem) “reproductive health.”
The outlet in question — and that euphemism for abortion — were two hints that what’s about to unfold won’t hew to PBS’s congressional mandate for “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”
Waters thinks that telling both sides of the abortion debate indicates a lack of “adherence to objectivity and balance.”
Waters complained further in an April 15 post:
After the surprise ruling by the Arizona Supreme Court to approve a Civil War-era law banning abortions except to save the life of the mother, the Friday edition of Amanpour & Co. (airing on PBS after first running on CNN International) hosted a predictably pro-choice liberal law professor as a guest. But the real liberal outrage spewed from guest host Bianna Golodryga, who let her own personal thoughts overwhelm any attempt at a balanced take, over the taxpayer-funded airwaves:
[…]After citing Trump’s own criticism of the Arizona decision, she noted: “it really puts Republicans in a bind in a sense all of these years with their attempts to overturn Roe finally happening. It’s as if the dog finally caught the car and the consequences are quite significant.”
But the host dismissed America’s federalist system of state law when she said that Trump’s rational view that abortion restrictions “should be done piecemeal up to the states is creating a lot of havoc. And obviously, at the end of the day it’s women and their families and their doctors who are paying the ultimate price.”
Note how Waters reflexively rejects right-wing extremism to praise Trump’s somewhat-less-extreme stance on abortion as “rational.” It’s as if this is all about getting Trump re-elected.
Waters spent an April 18 post being angry that a newscast accurately pointed out the archaic nature of the Arizona law:
PBS took another bite out of the surprise decision that recently emerged out of Arizona’s Supreme Court, on the Saturday edition of PBS News Weekend, anchor John Yang really loaded the ideological dice in his introduction: “The near-total abortion ban that the Arizona Supreme Court revived this week dates back to when Arizona wasn’t a state yet, when slavery was legal, and when only white men had the vote. Many Republican officeholders and candidate scrambled to distance themselves from the law.”
[…]Yang likened the Republican Party’s current status on the abortion issue to being “sort of like the dog that caught the car? They don`t know what to do with it now?”
Waters had really nothing to add after that other than oddly labeling this a “pro-abortion segment.”