CNN's 7 pm Eastern hour program John King USA was the only program on
Monday and the following morning on Tuesday that mentioned the March for
Life in Washington, DC. Anchor John King devoted only 11 seconds to the pro-life
demonstration, and omitted crowd numbers and footage
from the March. CNN.com's write-up on the annual event downplayed the
number of attendees as merely in the "thousands."
King led his evening program with a brief about an Illinois court
ruling that former Obama aide Rahm Emanuel was ineligible to run for
Chicago mayor. After playing a sound bite from Emanuel, the CNN
personality then gave moved on to the March for Life, and added illegal
immigration to it as an "emotional issue:"
KING: And anti-abortion activists stage a March for Life here in Washington. It's a big annual event, but we'll map out how the major fights over emotional issues, like abortion and immigration, this year are in the states, and we'll debate Colorado's proposal to copy the Arizona immigration law.
The anchor read this brief into the camera, without showing any footage from any point during the March.
Thirty-five minutes later, King raised the abortion issue again, but
instead of mentioning the demonstration earlier in the day, he focused
on the pro-life victories on the state level. He devoted just under 30
seconds to his brief, and spent the rest of the 9-minute segment to a
debate over a proposed law in Colorado targeting illegal immigration:
KING: The new Republican majority in the House has
new policy proposals, but a lot of the action, especially on tough
issues like abortion, immigration, is out in the states, especially
after the big conservative gains in the 2010 elections. Let's take a
look. Here are some anti-abortion trends in state governments.
If you see yellow here, that means the governor and the legislature are
both anti-abortion. The blue states- the governor is anti-abortion, and
there have been a number of developments in legislative proposals in
these states. We've told you about those before. We'll keep an eye on them.
Eric Marrapodi's article about the pro-life walk on CNN.com on Monday evening mentioned how "thousands of abortion opponents joined Monday afternoon in a cold march on Capitol Hill," but as NewsBusters's Tom Blumer noted earlier on Tuesday, "around 10,000 Catholics...met
to pray for an end to abortion at a pro-life vigil Mass in D.C. on the
eve of the annual March for Life." Most, if not all of those, attended
the following afternoon, and that morning, "more than 27,000 young people attended
[a Mass at the Verizon Center and a "parallel event" at the D.C.
Armory], which began after dawn and included readings by youths in
hooded sweatshirts and jeans, contemporary praise music and dozens of
priests hearing confessions in the sports arena's dining area," as the
Washington Post reported on Monday. So just between those three events
(with some possible overlap), tens of thousands of people attended, if
not over 100,000, if you go by pictures of the event.
On the other hand, Marrapodi stated near the end of his article that only "
about 15 abortion rights supporters
stood outside the Supreme Court building as the march unfolded. They
chanted and held signs of their own, imploring the court and Congress to
keep abortion legal." This demonstrated that he at least knew better
than former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who was
completely out of the loop as to "which side is represented the most" at the 2010 March for Life.
- Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here.
