Newspapers are always happy to cover bad news—as the old saying has it, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Stories of kindness and heroism are not considered news in the same way as are stories of atrocity and disaster—and massacre. Consider the coverage given to the slaughter in Paris of late associated with the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Consider the slaughter of innocents in Syria at the hands of ISIS. Consider the massacre of children at the hands of Boko Haram in Nigeria. All of these receive coverage from our western media, and accordingly arouse moral indignation and demands that something be done to make the massacres cease—and rightly so. Newspapers can be counted upon to cover a massacre.
Except, of course, when the massacre involves the unborn. Then they can be counted upon to largely ignore the whole thing. Let’s take one example among many: in my own part of the Vancouver lower mainland, if a dozen women congregate to protest government cutbacks to a women’s shelter, or march together in a “Take Back the Night” event to protest violence against women, this gets coverage. But when literally hundreds and thousands line the roads annually in a peaceful prolife demonstration, it is as if it never happened. For this there is no coverage at all. It seems that in my neck of the western woods at least, the amount of newspaper attention something receives depends upon its degree of political correctness.
The journalistic double-standard is especially stunning when one considers the numbers of the unborn whom we annually massacre. Consider the following: though Canada has a much smaller population than does the United States, it reported that in 2004 it aborted 100,039 children. (That figure does not include, presumably, the unreported abortions, classified as D&Cs.) That is the size of a small city (the population of Rialto, California, for example, in 2010 was 99,171.) Thus, in Canada, every year we massacre the equivalent of a small city, funded (in Canada anyway) by tax dollars through our medical system. And speaking of statistics, the leading cause of death now is not heart disease, or cancer. It is abortion.
Does anyone doubt that if similar numbers in the US or Canada were massacred by terrorists there would be a tremendous and continual outcry from every newspaper, Facebook and Twitter account in the country? Or that if such numbers of people perished through an epidemic—say Ebola—no price would be considered too steep to bring the death rate to a halt?
But the slaughter of the unborn continues more or less unabated in the west, and our newspapers utter not a peep. What does this mean? It means that our countries have forfeited the right to regard themselves as civilized, and that we have as nations descended into moral barbarism. We naively regard ourselves as civilized because we are technologically advanced. But think of such stories as that told in the novels The Hunger Games—those in charge of the Capitol were very technologically advanced, especially compared with those in the Districts, and yet they were morally bereft. One can measure the degree to which a people is civilized by their treatment of their weakest and most vulnerable. And by that test, America and Canada fail utterly. And the scariest bit? — that God is not mocked. He is the avenger of the widow and the orphan — and the unborn. All who regard themselves as civilized must do all they can to reverse our cultural commitment to such massacre, whether the newspapers will cover our efforts or not.