OneLife LA not covered by local press
Pro-lifers are used to media blackouts of their events. The
radical under reporting of Washington DC’s huge annual March for Life (which
draws hundreds of thousands every year) or San Francisco’s Walk for Life west
Coast which regularly draws over 50,000 people. But even by these shoddy
standards the negligence of the mainstream media in refusing to cover the
January 17 OneLife LA event in downtown Los Angeles sets a new low. As of noon
on January 19, a Google news search for “OneLife LA” articles over the previous
24 hours returned exactly two responses: an article from Catholic News Agency,
and an article in the Rock Hill Herald, a publication based in, Rock Hill,
South Carolina, which was a reprint of the OneLife LA press release
which followed the event. A similar search with the term “Archbishop Jose
Gomez” (who presided over the event) over the same time frame only returned one
response, the Catholic News Agency article.
Organizers estimated 15,000 pro-lifers in attendance, and
photos of the event certainly shows thousands of people. The event also had a
number of notable speakers including Hispanic movie star Eduardo Verastegui and
TV actress Patricia Heaton, both of whom are pro-life. Their presence makes the
lack of LA’s mainstream media coverage all the more striking, since movie/TV
stars are generally catnip to the city’s celebrity-obsessed press.
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| Covered by media |
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| Not covered by media |
The bias is shown by comparing the response to a Los Angeles
event selected at random: a December 5 protest against the killings by police
of three men: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Ezell Ford. The protest was
covered by CBS Los Angeles, the local affiliate of CBS News. The CBS LA
screenshot shows about 21 protesters in attendance. None appeared to be movie
stars. The tiny protest was also covered by mynewsla.com, the L.A. Daily News,
USA News and the Eagle Rock Patch (which all published the same story as
mynewsla.com), and the Los Angeles gotnewswire.com, which picked up the CBS
story. The Los Angeles City and Press website also linked to the CBS story. At
this point I stopped searching for more coverage, as the point has
been made. The mynewsla.com story opened with the sentence “Dozens of people
protesting the deaths of unarmed black men…” which correlates pretty accurately with the 21 or so protesters in
the CBS screenshot—there must have been 3 more out of site somewhere, which
brings the number up to “dozens.”
A shorter version of this post appeared in today's California Catholic Daily.
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