Moving the Media on Fake Clinics

Lost in all the Rachael Harder/Status of Women Committee brouhaha is a very important shift in media reporting on abortion, specifically on what criteria is used to designate someone as anti-choice.

From Global News, a rather blithe statement.

The issue of who would lead the committee came to a head last week when Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer chose to nominate Rachael Harder, an Alberta MP with an established record against abortion rights.

"Established," eh? By what measure?

Several measures: A thumbs-up (since qualified) from Campaign Lie. Her voting record.

And this from Macleans:

Harder granted $11,681 to two pregnancy clinics in Lethbridge to hire summer employees in 2016, using money that MPs were given to create local jobs. The clinics have mandates suggesting that every child has the right to be born.

The author cites the grants as evidence of Harder's unfitness, but shies away from calling them fake clinics or using terms like "anti-choice" or "anti-abortion."

Global News gets a little closer.

Rachael Harder isn’t just anti-choice in some abstract, philosophical way. She has received an endorsement from Campaign Life Coalition, has stated that life begins at conception, doled out close to $12 000 to pregnancy care centres that refuse to refer to abortion providers, and has committed to pass and introduce legislation to protect “unborn children.”

Four criteria there:
• endorsement by fetus fetishists
• statement of belief
• campaign promise

AND
Enabling federal grants to fake clinics.

Let's see how CBC covered it.

Last summer, Harder handed out some $12,000 in federal job grants to two pregnancy care centres in her Lethbridge, Alta., riding that refuse to refer patients to abortion providers.

Still not actually calling the fake clinics "anti-choice" but again using the fact as evidence of anti-choice stance.

Now iPolitics, the outlet that "broke" the story of Summer Jobs grants being given to anti-choice operations, using research by Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. (My bold.)

According to a breakdown of federal funds distributed under the 2016 Canada Summer Jobs Grant program, Harder allocated a total of $11,681 in the form of two grants to the Lethbridge Pregnancy Care Centre and the Lethbridge and District Birthright Society last year.

The Lethbridge and District Birthright Society got $3,383 of that total to create one job, and according to its website believes that “it is the right of every pregnant woman to give birth, and the right of every child to be born.”

The largest chunk of that, or $8,298, is listed as creating two summer jobs at the Lethbridge Pregnancy Care Centre, which is affiliated with the international anti-choice groups Heartbeat International and CareNet, and which states on its website that it does not perform abortions or make referrals to abortion services.

It is also an affiliate of the Canadian Association of Pregnancy Support Services (CAPSS), which describes itself as a “Christ-centred national ministry dedicated to providing support for life and sexual health by partnering with Pregnancy Centres across Canada,” and is linked to the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

The description of such centres as ‘pregnancy care centres’ has long been an issue of concern for pro-choice groups, which suggest the name is misleading for women who may come in unaware of the religious or political affiliations of the centres and then be actively persuaded against choosing abortion through emotional manipulation or inaccurate medical information about abortion procedures.

More from iPolitics:

As iPolitics reported earlier this summer, Harder allocated nearly $12,000 in federal summer job grants to two anti-abortion groups in her riding last year.

One more, with a humungous typo in it (now corrected), from Metro News:

As an MP, however, she gave money to two Alberta clinics that [do not]support the right to abortion.

As readers of this blog must know, one of our aims here at DAMMIT JANET! is to defund and disrupt the operations of fake clinics, aka crisis pregnancy centres.

It appears this aim is a little closer to realization when media organizations are now calling fake clinics "anti-choice/-abortion" and, more importantly, citing support of them as an indicator that one has an "established record against abortion rights."

Pro-choice has been having so many WINs lately, I didn't want this one to get lost in the victory dances.

Canadian Media Provide Comfort to the Enemy

In the media coverage of the tenth anniversary of equal marriage in Ontario, I noticed an odd thing.

Not one anti-gay spokesperson was polled on his or her 'take' on the situation. That's odd considering how strident opponents are and how readily they will spout their hate and lies.

No. In fact the coverage was rather self-congratulatory. Golly gee, aren't we enlightened and aren't we pleased to have moved on?

Look at this CBC piece for example.

And we have come a long way pretty damn quickly.

In 2002, an Ekos poll found that 47 per cent of Canadians had an unfavourable opinion of same-sex marriage. Taking into account the high number of undecideds, the pollsters concluded that opponents of gay marriage made up a majority. In 2012, an Ipsos Reid poll found that just 18 per cent of respondents were “totally opposed” to same-sex marriage. What happened?

Well, some would say that 'media happened'.

Even in the US, things are moving along on this front. Here's a bit of video on media there congratulating itself for its role in normalizing USians' view of gays and gay culture.

In fact, one pundit says: 'Gay culture is American culture'.

Funny thing. Here, pro-choice culture is Canadian culture.

But does our media celebrate that achievement? Does it congratulate itself for moving the issue forward and normalizing the notion that women have the same right to bodily autonomy that men do?

Does it appropriately marginalize the tiny percentage of extremists -- around 5% -- 'totally opposed' to abortion rights?

No. Canadian media -- perhaps envious of the acrimonious and profitable abortion 'debate' in the US -- continue to try to whip up controversy where it just doesn't exist. In covering Dr Morgentaler's death 22 of 35 stories saw fit to consult wannabe abortion abolishers to 'balance' the views of Dr Morgentaler's friends and supporters.

One would think this is counter-productive. After all, a large majority of Canadians -- two-thirds of us -- don't even want to talk about it.

But a group that does want to talk about it is the nutters themselves of course. In fact, the media's obeisance to their foot-stomping and shrieking has them crowing 'The media is ours'.

If this was war, one could say that the Canadian media is giving comfort to the enemy.

We ask again: When will Canadian media step up and celebrate the achievement of human rights for women?

Barbara Kay Lies Again

Last night Barbara Kay and I had this exchange over her column and my response to it.

@fernhilldammit The 1989 Holly Howe study using a N.Y. IA registry has never been refuted or withdrawn.

— Barbara Kay (@BarbaraRKay) October 5, 2012

(The Howe study is the only link in her piece backing up her 'abortion causes breast cancer' lie.)

Withdrawing a paper is a very big deal indeed and rarely happens. But science consists of refutation and refinement. I was curious what others -- scientists and non-scientists -- had to say about this particular study.

First, I regular Googled 'H.L. Howe cancer abortion'.

The first non-sponsored link is to the abstract itself. (The sponsored link is to an abortion clinic.)

I checked only the first five pages containing 50 of the 1.5 million links. But those were all links to anti-choice or religious sites or known anti-choice so-called scientists like Joel Brind.

Then I Scholar Googled it, which says that it has 83 scholarly citations.

That seemed low in the face of 1.5 million links on regular Google, but too many for me to waste time on. Especially since more than 100 of the world's leading experts have already concluded that there is no elevated risk of breast cancer after abortion.

So I went to PubMed Center, aka the US National Library of Medicine, where it says that nine other papers in its collection cited it.

I checked them out. One was not related to breast cancer but to colorectal cancer, so I didn't bother. Two were by our pal Joel Brind, aka 'a leading advocate of the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, a theory rejected by major medical bodies'. I didn't bother with those either.

Of the remaining six, not one supported the Howe study and four specifically refuted it.

It seems to me that this study is so old and so oft-cited by the fetus fetishists that some researchers feel the need to at least nod at it in the References section.

Kinda the way someone writing a history of science would nod at phlogiston.

Barbara Kay is correct to say that the paper has not been withdrawn. But she's lying again when she says it has never been refuted.

This morning I asked Kay on Twitter if she stands behind only this study of the ones she links to in her column. No reply, but I'll update if there is one.

BONUS: Here's a real scientist taking on the BAD science of ABC (abortion-breast cancer) link. Fascinating and thorough.

No, he's not actually irony-impaired

A very strange third attack on our very own Fern Hill has emanated from the keyboard of one Warren Kinsella. Suffice it to say that we all know that his irony-impaired act is totally disingenuous, and this is hardly the first time he's used this sort of tactic. You can rest assured that he knows that "good friend" is uttered in irony, and that he's playing some sort of game.

My theory is that he thinks that he's responsible for giving Fern some credibility from the whole Hudak business, and that he thinks that Fern is somehow basking in pleasure from his attention, and now that DJ has not proven a reliable ally to a Liberal buddy, he feels obliged to take away what he hilariously thinks he's given. And, likewise obligingly, the tedious Liberal authoritarian followers unsurprisingly follow suit. Couple that with Dawg's awesome act of totally sucking the wind out of WK's sails, and now it's personal, about his ego.

These sorts of tactics might work with buffoons who care and who live and die by what other people think of them, like Stockwell Day (nice takedown, guy), but for us at DJ, this is mainly rubberneckishly instructive, though admittedly less so than the actual megafail trainwreck that was the ProgBlog response to M312. Warren is a bright and very successful guy, but ultimately he too is limited by the things that brought him success, of which he is a clear product.

But DJ comes from another place and has another end. I have been a part of the Canadian political internet since the time when babble, the grandmother of the Canadian progressive internet, was itself young, and, in fact, quite a bit before that. This was also before FD, a site of whose "qualities" and "character" I am intimately familiar. I know very well what sort of loathesome little toads inhabit it, that disingenuous enabler git Connie Fournier included, I know that they mean people like me no good, and worse than no good.

Our Fern comes from the selfsame political culture that existed before Warren was ever any kind of player on the Canadian political internet and will probably exist after he retires from it. She too is well aware of what is at stake, is not a child on the interwebs, and can handle herself thankyouverymuch.

But, as I said, we should all take this as an instructive moment when the political culture of the traditional media and Parliament Hill meet the culture of internet debate and are shocked to discover that it is full of ordinary people with ordinary human relations. Thank you, Warren, for obligingly providing us this little reminder. Have fun with your quixotic little campaign. All of us, Fern included, will sit back and enjoy our popcorn.

Dirge/paean

Hi folks. I told you this was not a great time in my life to join another blog, so I haven't been around much, but I absolutely have to point y'all to this excellent article by now ex-CTV Québec City reporter Kai Nagata on why he quit and what he wants to do with his life.

Consider Fox News. What the Murdoch model demonstrated was that facts and truth could be replaced by ideology, with viewership and revenue going up. Simply put, you can tell less truth and make more money. When you have to balance the interests of your shareholders against the interests of the viewers you supposedly serve, the firewall between the boardroom and the newsroom becomes a very important bulwark indeed.

...

Take newsroom aesthetics as an example. I admit felt a profound discomfort working in an industry that so casually sexualizes its workforce. Every hiring decision is scrutinized using a skewed, unspoken ratio of talent to attractiveness, where attractiveness often compensates for a glaring lack of other qualifications. The insecurity, self doubt, and body-image issues endured by otherwise confident, intelligent journalists would break your heart. And clearly there’s a double standard, a split along gender lines.

...

Jon Stewart talks about a “right-wing narrative of victimization,” and what it has accomplished in Canada is the near-paralysis of progressive voices in broadcasting. In the States, even Fox News anchor Chris Wallace admitted there is an adversarial struggle afoot – that, in his view, networks like NBC have a “liberal” bias and Fox is there to tell “the other side of the story.” Well, Canada now has its Fox News. Krista Erickson, Brian Lilley, and Ezra Levant each do a wonderful send-up of the TV anchor character. The stodgy, neutral, unbiased broadcaster trope is played for jokes before the Sun News team gleefully rips into its targets. But Canada has no Jon Stewart to unravel their ideology and act as a counterweight. Our satirists are toothless and boring, with the notable exception of Jean-René Dufort.

...

Right now, there’s a war going on against science in Canada. In order to satisfy a small but powerful political base, the PMO is engaged in a not-so-clandestine operation to dismantle and silence the many credible opponents to the Harper doctrine. Why kill the census? Literally in order to make decisions in the dark, without the relevant data. Hence the prisons. Why de-fund scientific research?

...

I thought if I paid my dues and worked my way up through the ranks, I could maybe reach a position of enough influence and credibility that I could say what I truly feel. I’ve realized there’s no time to wait.

I have to resist the temptation to quote the entire thing. And I relate to it both politically and personally. I've made a similar choice recently and am in the process of tearing down a life I could mostly have kept in some manner if I wanted to, although I haven't been nearly as bold or as drastic as Nagata in going about it, and I'm probably a lot more likely to land on my feet. And Nagata's critique is applicable well beyond just journalism.

(h/t Warren Kinsella)

Towards a Post-Partisan Blogosphere?

impolitical has an interesting idea.

The internets will be this generation's Cité Libre, methinks.

Well, here's a site trying to get that going.

The Sixth Estate describes his effort:

I’m frustrated enough with the demonstrable inability of the major media to cover the important issues that I’m starting a little experiment called the Sixth Estate Newswatch, will be a news service based primarily on blogs (left to right, but mostly just the sane ones) and hopefully will become at least as useful, if not quite as often-visited, as the raving climate change denialist running Bourque. Consider this a demonstration of just how utterly useless the mainstream corporate media is if it’s serious about settling into a role consisting entirely of rebranding AP and CP reports, summarizing press releases and soundbytes and the occasional leak or ATI request which comes its way with only the slightest pretence of genuine investigative journalism, and then offering meaningless commentary from Larry Solomon, he who says Canadians shouldn’t vote.

There are, of course, aggregators out there, but the political ones are partisan.

And we just saw how well this increasingly poisonous partisanship performed for the country.

Other bloggers agree: Orwell's Bastard, Just Another Willy Loman, and The Galloping Beaver, to name just a few.

Maybe it's time, as they say, to move on.

Alice Klein, one of the people behind the (unsuccessful) strategic voting site, Project Democracy, calls herself a 'passionate post-partisan progressive'.

But it is not just progressives who are dissatisfied with both the state of democracy and the mainstream media in Canada. After all, Fox News North was created on the pretense premise that media is biased. (Well, it is, but not quite in the way right-wingers think.)

After the last prorogation, we saw citizens coming together to form groups like Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament and CRUSH. In the CRUSH Facebook group, there were disgusted democrats of all stripes, but we managed to keep partisanship out of the discussions.

I, for one, welcome the arrival of a new post-partisanship.

Who's in?

And now: Twitter opp!

Ugh. Contempt Party leader hit a new low with this kind of opportunism. And, if the above was a genuine interaction, why the complicated staging and framing for the benefit of the astro-turf purported grass-roots supporters (I believe that the Contempt Party is compensating those *real* people who show up at its campaign events) and the media.

From here:

There’s a second conversation going on between the political parties and their direct audiences — the thousands of potential voters who are “following” — or reading — them.

At times, that appears to be an intimate conversation: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper tweeted on Day 1 of the campaign to his son Ben. “Ben, Great win! And against older guys! The team must be excited. Congratulate them all for me. Dad.”

Yet, even the intimacy was no doubt meant for the broader audience. A photo on the Conservative party website shows Harper on the campaign plane, typing the in-flight tweet to Ben on his iPad after Ben’s “team had just won a volleyball tournament.”

But never fear, Contempt Party leader. Someone who "knows who the important people are" claims she's got Stevie UnSpiteful's number. Scroll down to get the ZOMG quote.

Centre of the media universe or

... political black hole? You decide.

[...]Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank's [made a] widely circulated pledge not to write anything about her for the whole of February.

Milbank wrote that, since Palin did not hold political office and had become "more like Ann Coulter," he would try to ease his "obsession" with writing about her, or mentioning her in any media appearance, for a month.

Speaking at a meeting of the Safari Club, a hunting organization, Palin apparently said that was fine with her. The boycott, she said, "sounds good, because there's a lot of chaos in Cairo, and I can't wait to not get blamed for it--at least for a month."

Palin became a focal point during the discussions on rhetoric and civility in the wake of the Arizona shooting; people accused her of having soured the national discourse through her use of phrases such as "don't retreat, reload!"

From here.

Hey Sarah, has anyone in your family or entourage of sycophants ever told that it's not all about you?

The last word goes to comic John Fugelsang.

Demand Honesty and Accuracy

It's not just the rhetoric. It's the outrageous LIES and DISTORTIONS.

Pro-choice people have been battling this crap for decades. Now, though, with the cranked-up crankiness of the loathesome Teabaggers and their cheerleaders like FUCKED News, the Tucson massacre was as inevitable as the assassination of Dr George Tiller.

Bruce Gorton puts it like this:

I think the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Gifford was to some extent caused by America’s major political pundits.

And it isn’t hard to see how – they make a habit of doing things like making abortion out to be exactly the same thing as killing babies, immigrants are sold as raping your daughter and stealing your job, and the Democrats as being in support of taxing you in order to do both while killing Grandma.

About 14% of Americans think the current US president may be the anti-Christ. Yeah, I think the guys they rely on for their information may well be a wee bit questionable, and driving the continent towards civil war and anarchy.

And here's a science blogger's thoughts on the matter.

So let's not be so concerned with civility, but instead demand honesty and accuracy. That will serve us far better.

Amen.

"The closing of the conservative mind ..."

Once more, David Frum stands up for the principle of journalistic integrity. Although I don't share most - if any - of his ideological notions, I admire him for being the lone voice in the arid rightwing crackpot media desert.

When people talk of the "closing of the conservative mind" this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people — everybody can be narrow minded — but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact.

When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement.

Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him. Instead, conservatives are consumed with a new snippets-out-of-context uproar, the latest round of JournoList quotations. Here at last is proof of the cynical machinations of the hated liberal media! As to the cynical machinations of conservative media — well, as the saying goes, the fish never notices the water through which it swims.

The difference between Dan Rather and Andrew Breibart is more complex than the simplistic reduction Frum suggests.

Dan Rather, one of the last old-school journalists, "succumbed" to the pressure of a form of news reporting in the 21st century which has become fast, furious and focused on trash journalism. He was trained to rigorously examine the sources of putative damaging disclosures about public figures; in this case his need to prove himself in a media increasingly staffed with hungry young wolves proved to be his downfall. Although made the scapegoat by his superiors at CBS when the documents pertaining to Bush were alleged to be forgeries, Rather has not gone quietly into that good night.

Andrew Breibart is a toxic fabricator, a con man, and a dumpster-diver. He's a self-styled JackAss reporter; he's a balding, schlumpy and braying male version of Ann Coulter; a wannabe Christopher Hitchens without the creds. Yet his presence amongst the Limbaughs and O'Reillys serves a purpose; he makes them look like serious newsman in comparison with his own disgraceful method of gotcha! reporting.


This time, according to Frum, he has surpassed himself. Breibart sliced and diced a video recording of an USDA black employee so it made it seem that she was an unrepentant anti-white folks racist. The material was manipulated; in reality she was recounting an individual experience of a paradigm shift and how she went on to help the farming families she had prejudged.

Frum is visibly disturbed and outraged by Breitbart's willful deception and malvolence.

There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone. There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart’s role. By the morning of July 21, the Fox & Friends morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart’s role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself.

As I said, Frum's voice is a lone rational voice among rightwing media hate-mongers.

Expect rightwing batshit crazies to spin this.

A very strange event, one with a potential tragic and fatal outcome, currently holds the US in thrall.

A 6-year-old boy climbed into a small homemade aircraft — a balloon resembling a flying saucer — and floated thousands of metres into the air in Colorado on Thursday, local media said. But when the balloon came to earth, there was no sign of the passenger.

The Denver Post newspaper reported that the boy got into the aircraft, which it described as a "home-made flying saucer" at his family's home in Fort Collins and that it then came loose from its tether.

The father of the boy, Richard Heene, said he had been experimenting with the balloon with his sons, floating it just above the ground while it was tethered by ropes. His son, six-year-old Falcon Heene, is said to have climbed into the basket and the ropes came undone. Another brother ran into the house and alerted the parents, according to police.

A National Guard chopper was trailing the balloon which was at one time estimated to be traveling at an altitude of 8,000 feet when it began to lose helium and come back to earth.

It will be interesting to watch the contortions that the usual US rightwing religious batshit crazies, birthers and assorted haters will execute in order to blame this on their president.

UPDATE (by fh): The boy is fine. He was hiding at home the whole time.

Missing the point.

Good grief. Are 'murricans as jaw-droppingly stupid as one would conclude after reading the comments posted here. Perhaps they're not missing the point, it's just too close for comfort?

Eric Zorn wrote a reflection on Chappaquiddick that analyses the monster in the room - current media practices that produce the intense feeding frenzy that follow any such event.

If we'd had insatiable 24/7 cable news networks in July 1969, the accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which a passenger in a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy drowned would likely have dominated the national consciousness for months.

Special programs every night devoted to nothing but pundits bickering over the depths of the 37-year-old Kennedy's responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, 28. Town-hall-style chat shows every afternoon in which ordinary Americans issued their verdicts and sentences before the evidence was in.

Probing interviews every morning with experts offering their views on whether Kopechne would have survived had Kennedy quickly gone for help. Live remotes all day and night from the bridge, the Kennedy compound, the Kopechne home and the streets of Edgartown, Mass., near the accident where random pedestrians would be asked for their views of Kennedy's failure to report the accident to police until the next morning.

I've had the opportunity of meeting many US citizens. None shared the mean-spirited and willfully ignorant attitudes on display in the comment section after Zorn's piece. I can only hope that a minority of extremely rabid and stupid are motivated to comment in the delusion that their repeated and constant shrieeeking will drown out sensible and rational voices. In that, they show they can dutifully follow FOXNews and its imitators.

Duffy channels Agnew?

Very strange things happen to people's brains when they get religion or political appointments. Fully exploiting the fact that as a senator speaking within the Red Chamber he cannot be sued for slander or libel, Mike Duffy made a rude speech, later retracting a metaphor under pressure from Harper.

Duffy's speech referred to the "nattering nabobs of negativism on the East Coast" who loudly protested equalization adjustments in the Harper government's recent budget that could cost Newfoundland and Labrador and P.E.I. equalization money.

Right at the moment, Mike Duffy's former colleagues think that it's funny, given that his current target happens to be Atlantic politicians.

Will they still find it amusing when he goes full Spiro Agnew and starts calling them "an effete corps of impudent snobs", the "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history" and the "commie-pinko-liberal press"?

Update: Both pogge and Dave at TGB reflect upon Duffy, albeit from different perspectives. Yet both conclusions seem unanimous in observing that Duffy's appointment is the equivalent of Harper lobbing a MASSIVE stink bomb into the Senate.