MEDIA MANIPULATION

Lesson one in media manipulation: If you can’t marginalize your opponents, then ignore them
by Terry O'Neill

WHENEVER any pro-lifer attempts to influence the course of politics in this country, the mainstream news media rise up as one to knock him on the head. The mere utterance of a single pro-life sentiment in the public square is enough to generate front-page headlines, overwrought editorials and ominous television news features. Canadians who doubt this have only to recall what happened to Stockwell Day during last fall's federal election campaign.

One would think, then, that a gathering of several hundred anti-abortionists at the most visible meeting place in Canada's third largest city would send the same mainstream news media into journalistic convulsions. If one pro-lifer in politics merits front-page treatment, then 1,000 of them meeting publicly to hear about ways to change the entire culture should surely merit special editions and live broadcasts.

Yet, when 1,000 Vancouver-area pro-lifers gathered on the evening of May 28 at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre - a landmark building that is a mere two-minute walk from the newsrooms of the Vancouver Sun and Province - their meeting was completely ignored by the big print and electronic media. Not a single word about the event was broadcast or published. What gives? The answer, is appears, is rooted in the mainstream media's bias against the pro-life cause.

The event in question was the Focus on Life benefit dinner. The third annual of its type, the dinner is designed to raise money to pay for the airing of pro-life commercials in primetime television.* It is an expensive project, but a successful one. Research shows that calls to a help line (1-877-88WOMAN) increase fivefold in response to the ads, which are extremely well produced. The woman-centred ads offer help in a crisis pregnancy, not judgment and, as such, comprise an important part of ongoing pro-life activism in this country.

The evening featured three main speakers. The first was Roman Catholic Archbishop Adam Exner of Vancouver. He asserted that the culture in which people live is like the water in which fish swim. When a culture is contaminated, people suffer the consequences, just as fish in polluted water will grow sick and die. And make no mistake, Archbishop Exner said, modern culture is polluted.

He listed seven signs of this pollution: a lost faith in God and sense of the sacred; a lost sense of sin; a lost sense of the sacredness of human life; a lost sense of the sacredness of marriage; a lost sense of the sacredness of society; a lost sense of right and wrong ("Everything is negotiable," he said, "and in the end the difference between moral right and moral wrong is only a personal preference."); and a diminished ability to distinguish the true and the false ("Telling the truth is not that important any more, as long as what you say is politically correct."). The need to change all this - to transform the polluted water into fresh water - is urgent, he concluded.

The next speaker was Gary Thomas of Bellingham, Washington, who is founder and director of the Centre for Evangelical Spirituality. His energetic address had two main themes: respect for women and how abortion is a "modern manifestation of a very ancient war" between God and the forces of darkness. "We're living in a new age of misogyny," he observed, an age that attacks women in manifold ways. The modern loss of modesty, for example, harms women just as abortion does.

Finally, Mother Agnes Donovan of New York took the podium. The Superior General of Sisters of Life, Mother Agnes established a religious order dedicated to protecting the sacredness of human life. Members of the order currently educate on euthanasia and abortion, and run a home for unwed mothers in their main convent. Mother Agnes' uplifting message was that all Christians are "compelled by faith" to be pro-life. Christians, she said, believe that human life is a gift, that it is sacred and that it is eternal. "It is because we as Christians believe this, we do as we do." God willed and loved humans into being, and to destroy human life is to reject God.

All in all, this is "radical" stuff in modern society. Assertions of ultimate truth and proclamations of faith in a divine Creator are not the sorts of things one is supposed to utter in these politically correct times. So where were the screaming headlines, the outraged editorials and the breathless live reports?

Nowhere, that's where. The event passed without notice in the mainstream media. Why? Because, I believe, to have reported on it would be to have acknowledged that pro-lifers are not few in number and are not all wild-eyed zealots. Rather, they are multitudinous, and they are neighbour-loving and law-abiding.

But that is a reality the big media, whose editorial policies are uniformly pro-abortion, apparently do not want to acknowledge. Rather, like pigs in mud, they appear to be content to wallow in their comfortable prejudices. The truth, it seems, is so disturbing that when it cannot be marginalized, it must be made to disappear.

*Donations can be sent to the Pro Life Society of B.C., #5 2599 Cedar Park Place, Abbotsford, B.C., V2T 3S4. Or call 604-853-3425 for more information