I’m glad I left the mainstream media in the rearview mirror years ago.
For example, I was a young reporter in New York when civilians thought then-governor Mario Cuomo was going to get a Democratic presidential nod. When I asked around the newsroom however, it was poo-poohed -- all the longtime political reporters “knew” Mario was “mobbed up” and couldn’t pass presidential scrutiny. They were just waiting for him to announce.
And today people are surprised that harassment by Herman Cain, idiocy by Michelle Bachman and Newt Gingrich and bigotry by Ron Paul have only just surfaced? They shouldn’t be. As I learned with the Cuomo story, reporters are lazy and don’t bother reporting anything until the fish is so big that frying it will advance their careers.
In this case, no one cared about Cain’s sexism, Bachman and Gingrich’s bizarre views or Paul’s racism until they became presidential timber. Suddenly, it was worth reporting. Likewise, in Iowa the media has blinders on to what quietly has become the most significant issue of this election, the so-called “personhood” pledge being billed by its backers as the most significant change in the anti-abortion movement since Roe v. Wade.
Sure they had fun with Bachman confusing hometown “hero” John Wayne Gacy, the murderous clown, with John Wayne, the movie star. Shooting fish in a barrel. And Gingrich -- that was chickens home to roost. Paul’s racism? One didn’t have to be a genius to notice his son, Sen. Rand Paul is borderline racist and, well, the apple never falls far from the tree.
So why hasn’t anyone in the mainstream called the Republicans on this pledge that they’re tripping over each other to sign. Because it would require work—reporters would actually have to learn something about biology, a subject the vast majority of them skipped in high school in their rush to see their names in print, with he result is that most can’t tell a zygote from a xylophone!
That means what we’ve missed so far is how, in evangelical state like Iowa, where farming is booming, it’s not “the economy, stupid” (as Bill Clinton put it) that the election will turn on; nor foreign affairs, where everyone (except Paul) is in agreement with President Obama that we can’t let Iran get the bomb.
No, with Rick Perry’s announcement last week he/d signed the pledge, the real story out of Iowa is that five of the seven Republicans in the caucuses have signed onto this radical new theory (first promulgated in Colorado only two years ago) that “life begins at conception,” i.e., the moment the sperm hits the eggs.
What makes this push by the religious right truly insidious, though, is that, unlike the case of “Roe v. Wade”—a relatively elegant compromise between the rights of a woman and society’s concern for a “viable” fetus—this isn’t about abortion at all.
A little bit of that biology class my former confreres missed: The amoeba-like fertilized egg, the “zygote,” is the first step in creating a new human. Virtually all Artificial Reproductive Technology, or ART as the science is colloquially known, would effectively be outlawed since almost all, up to and including “test tube” babies, involve manipulating the zygote.
