Say Anything Blog

By Ken Shepherd

Exit poll after exit poll in election after election shows the Democratic Party is staunchly supported by an overwhelming majority of African-American voters, many of whom are much more socially conservative on issues like abortion than their party leadership. The Democratic Party is also staunchly supported in primary battles and in fundraising drives by hard-core pro-choice liberals—we’re talking the same people who fought tooth-and-nail the federal ban on Partial-Birth Abortion.

So when a group of black ministers conducted a protest march in Washington, D.C., last week to raise awareness of its criticism of Planned Parenthood, media outlets had the recipe, instantly, for stories about possible conflicts that could divide the Democratic Party coalition on substantive, hot-button issues.

To perhaps no one’s surprise here at NewsBusters, while the media covered the much hyped “Unity” rally in New Hampshire, the cable networks failed to even show up to shoot B-roll of Thursday’s pro-life march on the DNC and RNC headquarters. Washington Times staffer Julia Duin covered the march and found no TV cameras present to record it:

I noticed two discordant events during Thursday’s pro-life demonstrations by black activists on Capitol Hill.

One was the lack of TV cameras. They said a Fox crew showed up early, then left on another assignment way before the demonstration began. But here you had folks wearing T-shirts with sayings on them like “black genocide” and carrying signs saying “Abortion is not a family value” and traipsing down SE Capitol Street in steamy weather between the Democratic National Committee HQ and the Republican National Committee building. There were kids, there were pastors, there was quite the cross-section. It was colorful and in your face and there were folks like Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, popping off gospel hymns every time she got near a mike. It was just the right stuff for good TV footage. Our photoographer [sic], Astrid Riecken (one of whose photos is shown with this post) had a field day shooting stuff and six photos ran in Friday’s paper.

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