Just read that abortion reporting carefully

The media MO is, of course, to use euphemisms for abortion and its ravages, and manipulate the language to cue readers to think positively or negatively of abortion activists and pro-lifers. But they also frequently just get things wrong, revealing a significant lack of depth in so vital a social issue as abortion. Ed Whelan is always good at taking on these flaws, over at National Review Online, among other places, and he’s been examining some misreporting lately on the Supreme Court partial-birth abortion ban. Good thing. We need to know this stuff well.

Here’s what Whelan originally wrote yesterday:

This AP article today on the Supreme Court term refers to the Supreme Court’s partial-birth ruling by asserting that “the court for the first time banned an abortion procedure.”  Does the AP’s Supreme Court reporter really not understand that it was Congress that (by bipartisan majorities) passed the federal ban on partial-birth abortion and that the Supreme Court, far from banning anything itself, ruled merely that the federal ban survived the facial challenge to its constitutionality?  Or does the reporter think that this distinction is too subtle for his readers?

Now, that story has been amended. So Whelan comments:

1.  I am ready to assume that the initial passage was an inartful error made under deadline pressure.  But the nature of the error is telling.  It’s rather as though a reporter on the baseball beat wrote that a baseball team wasn’t scoring many touchdowns.  A reader would fairly conclude that the reporter doesn’t really know the basics of baseball…

2.  The new passage is rather curious.  Unlike all the other case descriptions in the article, it makes no effort at a neutral and informative description of what the court actually held.  In particular, there is no mention (even euphemistically) of partial-birth abortion.  Moreover, while the new passage is technically accurate, it confuses the innocent reader by mistakenly implying that the court had previously rejected nationwide (i.e., federal) bans on abortion procedures.  The case was in fact the first time the Court ever addressed “a nationwide ban on an abortion procedure.”  Unconsciously or otherwise, the new passage seems to embrace the spin of abortion-advocacy groups.

This kind of reporting is frankly fooling fewer of the people, more of the time.