Media give a group hug to Wendy Davis and a stiff arm to balanced reporting

If you’ve been watching the coverage of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis over the last week, then perhaps you’ve noticed that she has received a wide open embrace by the media. Many glowing profiles have appeared along with softball interviews that clearly assume the justice of her cause. Nevermind the fact that a majority of Americans—including women!—stand squarely against the late term abortions that Davis stands for.

I guess we have come to expect unfair and unbalanced reporting from the mainstream media when it comes to abortion, but it really is astonishing what little self-awareness reporters have about their own biases. They see nothing at all amiss about fixating on Davis’ tennis shoes while hardly mentioning at all the merits of the bill and its impetus in the infamous Gosnell trial.

To this end Ross Douthat of The New York Times writes this:

Still, it seems like a genuinely fair-minded, ideologically disinterested press would at least tend to mention the link between the Gosnell case and the Texas bill as often as it mentions Wendy Davis’s footwear. Or at least take note, when framing its coverage of her filibuster, of the fact that Davis’s understanding of “women’s rights” is shared by at best a minority of American women. Or at least ask Davis, in a nationally-televised interview, to actually explain her views on late-term abortion, instead of allowing her to skate through the conversation without even using the word “abortion” at all.

But given that the national media had to be basically shamed into covering the Gosnell case in the first place, it isn’t surprising that we’re getting running shoes instead.

Douthat is right on the money here. The coverage has been embarrassing, and so have the interviews. But that fact seems to be lost on star struck media personalities. Nevertheless, here’s a question that I wish would occur to Davis’ adoring fans in the press:

Senator Davis, why do you support the right to inflict pain and death upon twenty week old unborn babies? Shouldn’t these unborn humans be protected from being dismembered in the womb?

I’m not holding my breath for that one. As the media give a group hug to Wendy Davis, they are giving a stiff arm to balanced reporting.