This piece kicks off a short series of reflections that will run over the next three days: anniversaries.
Here’s a brief Golden Anniversary memory of a brave journalist, David Shaw. He was a 31-year-old reporter on the Los Angeles Times in 1974 when an editor gave him a new beat: media critic. Shaw’s task: Do tough reporting on news media, including the Times itself. His was a rare job at major newspapers. Shaw did it brilliantly, and his fellow reporters honored him—until 1990.
That year he wrote a series of articles showing how major media, including the Times, displayed pro-abortion bias via words and images. Shaw described word choice: The Times and other newspapers called abortion advocates “pro-choice” but refused to call abortion opponents “pro-life.” Shaw complained that his own newspaper referred to a new Louisiana law as “the nation’s harshest.” He noted, “that’s the view of abortion-rights advocates; it’s ‘harsh’ toward women’s rights. But abortion opponents regard the legislation as benevolent.”
Shaw also said his newspaper called laws that slightly reduced abortions “restrictive” rather than “protective.” He looked at pictures, or rather the absence of pictures showing unborn children. He had lots of specific detail. He even recommended a book I had written two years before, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988, which showed how most major newspapers became consistently pro-abortion in the late 1960s and stayed that way.
Reporters committed to abortion hated Shaw’s series. When Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for articles on a different subject, the Times management delivered lots of champagne bottles to the newsroom for a big celebration. Many of the bottles remained unopened. So I’d like to raise a toast to Shaw, posthumously. He died in 2005, at age 62, from a brain tumor. He told the truth. To my knowledge, no newspaper in the past three decades had published a self-analysis on abortion coverage. ###