Finally the western Washington media cottoned on to the fact that there was a major political battle going on in Olympia and wrote a story about HB1366, the bill to destroy Washington State pregnancy centers on behalf of the abortion industry.
Yet reading the article, you'd be hard pressed to figure any of this out.
First, the article starts off by using the term "limited service pregnancy center" -- without quotation marks. The stigmatizing and biased term was coined by the abortion lobby to serve their political agenda. For the AP, the pejorative language of the extreme left is considered neutral and objective.
Second, it makes absolutely no mention of the fact that the measures in the bill have been found unconstitutional by a federal court, and the Attorney General of Washington has indicated that this bill is even worse.
Third, Robin Hindery, the AP writer -- it would be wrong to use the term 'journalist' -- says nothing about the shocking punitive measures in the original bill that were without precedent and were determined by almost everyone who read them as having been designed for one purpose: to put pregnancy centers out of business by making it impossible for them to afford the flurry of frivolous lawsuits. The language was so bad that the Democrats replaced it with an "injunctive relief" provision. Miss Hindery makes no attempt to explain what the consequences of this would be, or that it would have the same effect.
Fourth, Miss Hindery does not state anywhere that 15 years ago the abortion lobby was arguing the exact opposite of this, when consumers and citizens were trying to get some minimal regulation on the abortion business to force them to tell the truth about abortion to abortion-seeking customers. They fought tooth and nail to avoid such mandates, but now are arguing the opposite.
Similarly, the fact that the ACLU just one year ago was on the opposite side of this issue was somehow omitted by the report.
Even the very title of the article, "Bill seeks to clarify Washington pregnancy-center services" takes the Democrat-Abortion spin at face value. The death of the bill in the Senate is reported as "a relatively common practice" without challenge, when it was actually a significant lobbying victory.
It's additionally pathetic that the massive turnouts from pregnancy care center supporters at committee hearings in opposition to the bill even made it into a piece by the self-proclaimed left-wing "The Stranger", but not into the AP/Seattle Times account.
Some have speculated that with the bill possibly dead in the House Rules Committee, NARAL & Planned Parenthood put in a call to their buddies at the Associated Press and ordered up a press release disguised as a news report to try to breathe new life into the legislation.
Either way, it's high time that the Seattle Times and Associated Press put large disclaimers in "30 point font or larger", "prominently, clearly, and conspicuously" on all their communications that they are a "limited truth news service".
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1 comment:
Indeed, 30 point type sounds appropriate. Can we get "injunctive relief" from AP writers?
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