A few weeks ago I attended the Walk-for-Life in San Francisco, having volunteered to drive a large group of high school students to the event. On arrival, I dropped them off near the rally kick-off point. Having no prior experience, I assumed it would be easy enough to go park my car and rejoin my students (wearing bright red sweatshirts) later. After all, I figured, there wouldn’t be that many people. How wrong I was. The crowd was enormous.
To find my group, I stood at a lamppost along the route, watching hundreds of people passing by. After about 30 minutes I began to count. The marchers – confined to the boundaries of a two lane street – walked at least twenty abreast with each line of marchers passing by my spot every two seconds. I waited in that same spot for over 90 minutes after I began counting. When I finally found my little band of students and joined in the walk, the crowd stretched out far behind me, still thick with humanity. By my personal estimate, I believe there were 60,000 to 70,000 people there that day, quietly marching, holding signs, signing songs and saying prayers to protect human life. But you wouldn’t have known it from the news coverage that day.
The Make-Believe Media grudgingly reported this annual event but in a manipulative and distorted manner. The coverage focused its cameras tightly on one pro-life speaker at the rally before the walk began, showing only his face, never panning back to show the throngs around him. Not even a five second clip of the endless waves of marchers walking the route that day. And they absurdly underreported the number of marchers.
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But what the MBM did allow you to see, the focus of their story that day, was the freak show – a small band of perhaps 15 malcontents running up and down the length of the route with a bull horn shouting “keep your rosaries off our ovaries.” These abortion fanatics dressed in drag and some carried obscene signs urging explicit homosexual acts – and understand that thousands of the marchers were children. But the media carefully avoided publishing any images of those X-rated signs or the fact that the freaks waved them in front of children. These pathetic caricatures — these ambassadors of homoculturalism and feminism – got disproportionate air time on the networks to howl their anti-life clichés.
Cut to Valentine’s Day – a day celebrated by Hallmark, florists and Planned Parenthood passing out free condoms – but originally a religious feast celebrating a man who was killed by government officials for the crime of marrying Catholic men and women in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. One wonders when new blood from martyrs defending traditional marriage will once again refresh the Church Militant.
Well, this year, something good and decent happened.
On February 1st, Lila Rose and her group LiveAction.org began releasing a series of damning videos of Planned Parenthood. The videos and stories behind them went viral. The Make-Believe Media responded feebly, incoherently, and even tried the unprecedented act of meeting and collaborating to concoct a lockstep narrative. But the more the MBM reacted in varying forms of rage, condescension or silence, the greater impact they gave the videos.
By Thursday, February 10th, efforts were made to organize grassroots lunchtime rallies at over 200 Planned Parenthood sites protesting Federal funding. I helped organize one in my area.
In less than three days’ time, on Monday, Valentine’s Day, thousands of protestors held peaceful protests in front of Planned Parenthoods across the nation. At my location, 30 pro-life individuals came to hold signs and banners for an hour.
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It struck me that more people protested at that one clinic, on three days’ notice, than the total number of pro-aborts attending the San Francisco rally, a widely publicized annual event in the heart of the liberal homocultural mecca. Yet, no mainstream media reported the pro-life gatherings. The sleeping media monster probably didn’t even know it was happening.
Juxtapose this Make-Believe Media obsessing on a handful of abortion supporters at the Walk-for-Life against the MBM silence about pro-life support across this nation. Or, put another way, consider that far more pro-lifers appeared at the San Francisco event than pro-union protestors appeared in Wisconsin this week. Yet contrast the utter media blackout of the one versus the hysterical media frenzy with the other.
This is why the generation of Lila Rose, the 20-somethings, together with other groups such as the Tea Party Generation, ignore and bypass traditional media. Instead they prefer the internet, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks to connect, to report and rally, to transmit and share news. And the result was stunning – four days after these Valentine’s Day protests and in slightly more than two weeks after the video releases, the House of Representatives voted to withhold federal taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.
Friday’s House vote to defund Planned Parenthood represents much more than a temporary victory for certain pro-life forces. It is evidence that one of Progressivism’s hydra heads, called the mainstream media, has been severely defanged and will no longer imperiously dictate the political debate among the next generation of Americans. The liberal monster once known as the mainstream media will increasingly become irrelevant and sequestered to the realm of myth and legend. Hats off to Lila Rose, citizen journalists and the new media.
Videos h/t J. Kulda and R. Catelli, pro-life warriors and citizen journalists
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