Our broken media was fixated for two weeks on the ultimately successful evacuation of 124,000 Afghan allies and U.S. citizens. They portrayed it -- without context -- as a shameful Biden failure, presumably because we couldn't airlift millions more for months to come, suggesting that our military should have stayed (e.g., "mainstream media" commandos Peter Baker, Richard Engel, Clarissa Ward, Ian Pannell, and Martha Raddatz). Meanwhile, they virtually ignored the horror of Texas' cruel, restrictive abortion law which was given a pass by the right-wing Supreme Court under their noses. Media Matters tallied up the number of times that cable news covered the Texas story since August 25, and discovered that it was covered just three times, all at the last moment before the law went into effect on September 1:
"The most restrictive abortion law in the country went into effect in Texas today, effectively banning abortion in the state after efforts to halt the move in court were unsuccessful. Since August 25, the law has been covered in just three cable news segments, all of which aired last night. [snip]
According to a Media Matters review, CNN and MSNBC did not devote a single segment to the story between August 25 and last night, when Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and Don Lemon on CNN had lengthy segments about it. Fox News did not cover the law in the period studied."
As we noted yesterday, the Texas law will almost certainly be the template for other Republican-controlled states to pass draconian laws that essentially ban abortion, even in cases of rape and incest as the Texas law does, impacting tens of millions of women's reproductive choices. Texas' law bans abortions at six weeks, when most women aren't aware they're pregnant, and authorizes Christofascist zealots to sue people who help women get abortions (like parents, friends, clinic workers, perhaps even taxi companies, etc.).
Republican-wired media malpractice has been common since the days of Ronald Reagan, and isn't limited to social issues. It was very rare when coverage of Hurricane Ida noted climate change / greenhouse gasses as the cause of more and more frequent monster hurricanes, not to mention years-long droughts and wildfires. The Washington Post uses the slogan "democracy dies in darkness." It's long past time that our broken media shed far more light on actions that affect the daily lives of millions of women and families, as well as our planet.
