Philadelphia and Boston Horrors: This Is a Test

In Philly the complicating factor is abortion.  If such conditions were found in any non-controversial medical center, offering procedures like dentistry or hip replacements, the media would be calling for someone’s head on a plate — but this is an abortion provider.  

Is this not a valid news story? Should reporters cover the story of such reckless endangerment of patient safety and shameless profiteering?  Is there concern that such reporting might lend strength to the pro-life movement, and weaken the abortion-rights cause?  Is this last question at the heart of the media silence of this supposed #LocalCrimeStory?

If political donations are any indicator, news agencies and their management tilt heavily toward the political Left.  Hopefully, journalistic professionalism would overcome that, but reporters are human and have bills to pay like the rest of us.  If you know your bosses to be politically active, reporting stories hostile to their politics might limit career advancement.  This could partially account for some political stories or angles being preferred above others.

These stories converge in this way: they present us with a test.  More than one test, actually.

They hold a mirror up to the rest of us; showing who we are when it really matters.  Among them:

They test our values, and whether we are committed to justice equally applied.  They question what outrages us. Heartless choices by uncaring people have killed women and children in both. They place the beheading of infants and the death of 8 year old Martin side-by-side; testing whether both killings produce outrage.  When politics and human life are placed in tension, which ultimately takes priority?

They test our assumptions.  Have we already made assumptions about what motivated the bombings, and who will be implicated?  Have we assumed whether the “clinic” had the complicit silence of officials and policy, or whether there are/aren’t others like it?  

They test our will.  Will we demand justice, even if we don’t like who is condemned?  Will safer policy and oversight now be pursued “if it saves just one life”?  Will other countries (e.g. Canada) begin to reconsider its own assumptions about this “industry” as a result?

And, so the public can make informed decisions for the next “third-rail” issue, will we finally demand the apolitical journalism a free society deserves?