The Media Research Center loves to Heather conservatives who stray from right-wing orthodoxy. It’s also not afraid to give the Heathering treatment to its buddies at Fox News. The MRC’s Brad Wilmouth complains in a May 7 post:
For a news network that is often caricatured as right wing, Fox News Channel peppered a pro-life guest with an awful lot of questions that were skeptical of Iowa’s new law that bans abortion at about six weeks pregnancy.
In fact, Fox and Friends Sunday host Abby Huntsman (a veteran of MSNBC) even cited one poll alleging a majority of Americans want most abortions to be legal, and did not mention that other polling has claimed the opposite.
At 7:25 a.m. Eastern, after recalling that Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds signed the law a few days ago, which bans abortion after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected, Huntsman introduced Iowa Republican State Senator Rick Bertrand and immediately brought up a survey suggesting most Americans would oppose such a law:
You know this is one of the most controversial issues that we debate in this country, so, looking at recent polls and survey done on just how the country is feeling about abortion, there’s a recent Pew survey that shows that 57 percent of the country supports legal abortion. That’s compared to 40 percent who support illegal. So the question off the top is: Is this bill the most — the strictest bill on abortion — is this what the American people American people are wanting?
The polling she was referring to was a survey released by the Pew Research Center in June 2017. Not mentioned was that in May 2017, by contrast, Gallup reported that 54 percent of respondents believe abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, while 42 percent supported abortion being legal in most or all cases.
For the rest of the interview, the FNC host did not ask a single question that was sympathetic to the effort to protect unborn babies.
Note Wilmouth’s dig at Huntsman for having once worked at MSNBC — pure Heathering at its finest.
And it’s particularly hilarious to hear Wilmouth’s complaint that Fox News is “caricatured as right wing” when — in huffing that Huntsman failed to advance the “effort to protect unborn babies” — he’s demanding that it live up to that supposed caricature.