About 60 black activists staged a demonstration

And almost no media came to cover it. In a presidential election year. In which race and politics and social issues are more prominantly debated than anytime in the last four decades.

The post below on this reports the basics. Let’s get back to that. There’s a fascinating and important story here.

The Washington Times is one of the only media that covered the event. Julia Duin has a few different stories on it – good reporting – and she originally noted that the absence of media coverage was oddly conspicuous. But that’s hard to find now. It may be there, I’m just not accessing it easily. So here’s what Duin reported the other day:

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, 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.

But where were all the other media outlets and the networks? CNN? The wires? It’s like these folks did not exist. Here you had pastors like Arnold Culbreath with Protecting Black Life, a Cincinnatti group, claiming that Planned Parenthood disproportionally builds its clinics in majority-black and Hispanic areas.

(I called Planned Parenthood and they said they build them where the need is. Jesse Lee Petersen, a pastor out of Los Angeles said, “Planned Parenthood says they provide health services to the black community. I ask: What is healthy about killing black children?)

Goooood question. Why aren’t more media folks asking this? Duin wonders the same thing:

Another pastor, Stephen Broden, was saying there has been 14 million black abortions since 1973 and that 1,452 black children get aborted each day. Are these folks telling the truth? Isn’t it even worth interviewing them to see if they are? Why the near-media blackout? Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is as liberal as they come on this issue and his voting record shows it. Isn’t this a huge election issue? Why, then, the dearth of reporters and photographers?

It’s an inconvenient truth they don’t want to cover.

So now, the available reporting at the Washington Times by Duin (besides the above) analyzes what this story might mean to the presidential campaign, an analysis that other major media should be doing.

“We are here to urge Democratic candidates that donations from Planned Parenthood are racist to the very core,” said Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union, as she stood in front of Democratic National Committee headquarters on South Capitol Street. “I’m sick of hearing this is a Republican issue. For children killed or maimed by abortion, it’s a life-and-death issue.”

Officials for Planned Parenthood declined to comment, as did Democratic Party and Republican Party officials.

Which says plenty, right there.