‘The First Story They Tell Is About the Leak Itself’

Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Julie Hollar about Roe reversal for the May 13, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220513Hollar.mp3

Salon (5/9/22)

Janine Jackson: Commentators like Heather Digby Parton and others are already documenting lawmakers and lobbyists stating that their support for an abortion ban is just a part of their intent to eliminate reproductive rights entirely, including making contraception like IUDs and Plan B illegal, and prosecuting miscarriage as manslaughter.

It’s hard to imagine that there are people who think the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling is only about abortion, but if there are, they can blame corporate media, at least in part, for years of downplaying and normalizing the scope and the scale of the assault on reproductive justice.

From reducing everything to Roe when that law has always left some potentially pregnant people out, to the current fascination with everything about this new ruling: who leaked it, how it’s okay to protest it, everything except what it means and how we got to this point, much less how we can get away from it.

FAIR’s Julie Hollar has been tracking this coverage for years. She’s FAIR’s senior analyst and managing editor, and she joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Julie Hollar.

Julie Hollar: Thanks, Janine; it’s good to be here.

FAIR.org (5/6/22)

JJ: I hope no one thinks we’re claiming that news media aren’t covering the import of this ruling. Of course they are. And that’s not the point. But when you look at the coverage now, and over time, as you have, you just don’t see news media rising appropriately to the occasion, would you say?

JH: I think you have to ask what’s the priority here for the corporate media in their coverage. And if you look, the day that this leak happens, it’s obviously front-page news. It’s at the top of the nightly newscasts. And yes, they talk about what’s the impact going to be for people in this country, but the priority here, the top of the show, the first story that they tell is about the leak itself, who might’ve done this, what is the impact on the Supreme Court, the relationships between the justices and their clerks. That’s story No. 1, and then story No. 2 asks, what are the consequences for others?

But even there, when you watch the nightly newscasts, it wasn’t exactly, “What’s the impact on people who might get pregnant?” It’s: “What is the impact on the clinics who serve them? What is the impact on the pro-choice and the anti-choice movement?” I didn’t see the people themselves who would be most impacted getting interviewed on these shows.

Julie Hollar: “There will be more people dying, there will be greater poverty. There will be worse health outcomes all across the board for people.”

So I think, yes, there is some coverage of that impact. It is downplayed, and it is sandwiched in between all of these other stories that are distracting attention from what is really the heart of what’s going on here.

JJ: And then even a finding within a finding, I thought it was interesting in the piece that you wrote about the initial coverage of this leaked ruling that one place when the question was asked, what’s going to happen to, they said to the women, many of them low-income, who every year get abortions in states like Mississippi, Texas, places like that—the one time that was asked, it was asked of the leader of an anti-choice group.

JH: Exactly, who gave a very reassuring answer: “Oh, we will step up our efforts to take care of those people and make sure the outcomes are good.”

Well, you know what, that’s not a satisfactory answer, because that’s not what’s going to happen. You know, there could be some “stepping up,” and what’s really going to happen is, all of the research has shown that, there will be more people dying, there will be greater poverty. There will be worse health outcomes all across the board for people.

FAIR.org (5/19/21)

JJ: I think that we have seen news media acknowledging that an overturning of Roe v. Wade will launch myriad of other efforts at the state level. They talk about these trigger bills, but at the same time, these things didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been building for years. And when you looked last year at coverage of these state campaigns, it seemed like media were not acknowledging them appropriately as they were brewing.

JH: Not at all, not at all. The first four and a half months of last year, there were hundreds of state-level restrictions introduced in state legislatures. Many of them passed, and the national media just simply ignored them, for the most part. You got a few mentions here or there, very short, nothing in depth. Nothing at all that gave a sense of the scale of what was going on.

FAIR.org (1/6/14)

And it’s not just last year. I feel like I’ve been writing this article since I started at FAIR, which was quite some time ago. I wrote this article 10 years ago when the right was ramping up state-level campaigns and laws to restrict abortion access.

And we saw a sharp drop-off in national media coverage of abortion exactly when these things are happening. So the media will pay attention when there’s a huge blockbuster story, like the Supreme Court leak. But during the steady drip-drip of what’s been happening for years, for decades, they’ve been just completely missing.

JJ: And when they do kind of refer to it in an offhand way, which if you just look up references to abortion, you will find lots of stories that kind of toss it off as an issue, as a political football. And one of the things that is often attached to it is the word “divisive.” And this is just, to me, like a drip, drip, drip of misinformation that people are consuming every time they hear a reference to abortion rights.

JH: “Divisive” is like one of the media’s favorite words, right, and the thing that they’re trying to put themselves outside of. They’re going to stay neutral and objective, and they’re just going to report both sides of the issue. And, in fact, we don’t have at all any sort of a balanced playing field here, as they’re trying to portray it.

JJ: Overwhelmingly, even in stories that will describe it as a controversial or divisive issue, they’ll then go on to say, “Oh yes, 7 in 10 people in the United States don’t want Roe overturned.” So if 7 out of 10 is divisive, then we gotta reconsider a whole lot of other opinions.

A lot of times at FAIR, we think, “What would we hope for from a free press in an aspiring democracy?” and compare that to what we’ve got. What we have in the wake of this, of this leak, of this incredibly important leak, we hardly even begin to know how important ruling, is we’re seeing free press, supposedly, defenders talking about how the most important thing to do is to not protest in a way that is uncivil. It’s kind of bizarre.

Washington Post (5/9/22)

JH: Right. So like the Washington Post, for instance, editorial board complaining about the protesters outside of the justices’ houses, and actually endorsing having them be fined and/or imprisoned for doing so.

They use the word “totalitarianism” in this editorial, which, frankly, I searched their website. I could not find another editorial in which they use the word “totalitarian” or “totalitarianism” referencing any sort of domestic context, only with respect to protesters in front of Supreme Court justices’ houses, protesting against the fact that the government is trying to take away their rights to their own bodies. The Washington Post editorial board clearly has some priority issues, I would say.

JJ: I often think it would be interesting to look up the way that news media talk about, for example, the civil rights movement, or the marches with Dr. King, etc., and they would present themselves as being staunch defenders of civil disobedience and of the right to speak up when you know that the system is failing. And yet you have to judge them by how they act in the moment, right? So we’re seeing what they choose to emphasize right now, and we should be paying attention, I guess.

JH: Absolutely. The Post did also have an editorial when the leak first came out, professing to be very concerned about this, saying that this was a blow to the Court’s legitimacy, that this is not what the Court should be doing. But then the next time they editorialize about the issue, it’s against the protesters. So it’s like they’re wanting to have it both ways.

JJ: So one of the things that I know that you found, when you looked at top-tier or major media coverage last year, in terms of the state-level predations, was that there were instances of attacks on reproductive rights that did seem to interest, for example, the New York Times. It just wasn’t Texas.

JH: Right. It’s easy for corporate media to raise these issues when they’re speaking about some sort of official enemy of the United States. So if it’s in Venezuela, if it’s in China, that’s front-page news. It’s not front-page news when it’s Texas, when it’s South Dakota, when it’s something more local.

It is the same as this “totalitarian” issue that’s with the Washington Post. There are different standards applied to different parties.

JJ: Finally, we know there’s going to be lots of coverage. What would be helpful to add to it—or maybe “who,” I guess, is the question—that could substantially improve the coverage of what could hardly be a more important issue?

JH: First of all, absolutely, there needs to be much more front-and-center coverage of the potential consequences of this, the potential concrete consequences. There have been a lot of studies done about what happens when reproductive rights are restricted or completely eliminated, and that needs to be really front and center so people understand what this is really about.

I think about in the nightly newscasts, they led off their shows with their justice correspondents, their legal correspondents. And you just have to think, what if corporate media could have rights correspondents instead of justice correspondents?

Justice, for them, is an institutional idea of, we’re going to cover the Justice Department. That’s your job. And if, instead, we could worry about the real-world consequences, what is going on with people’s rights in this country? If that could be what the media focused on, we would be in such a better place.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with FAIR’s own Julie Hollar. You can find her work on media coverage of abortion rights, along with other things, at FAIR.org. Thanks so much, Julie, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JH: Thanks for having me.

The post ‘The First Story They Tell Is About the Leak Itself’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates

Leave a Reply Cancel reply