What Was and Wasn't Covered; How the Media Covered the "March for Women's Lives".

News media coverage of the April 25 "March for Women's Lives" in Washington, D.C., it could be argued, was by and large pretty fair. The conspicuous exception is the hometown Washington Post. Many news reports covered both sides of the issue, pointing out that many of the marchers were there for a variety of reasons, not just abortion.

From another perspective, however, coverage left much to be desired.

For example, there was little attention paid to an important press conference held just blocks from where the pro-abortion marchers would assemble two days later. NRLC brought together a powerful assemblage of pro-life and pro-family organizations that used their own eloquence and the startlingly pro-life results from a new Zogby poll to illustrate that the marchers who had come to the nation's capitol were very much out of step with the American people. (See page 28 for a complete list of organizations whose representatives spoke at the press conference.)

The poll found majorities among women, men and youth who support the pro-life viewpoint. As Americans learn more and more truth about abortion, it's only a matter of time they reject it. (See poll, beginning on page 27.)

Evidently reporters were too busy writing stories with headlines such as, "For Some Believers, A Cause Across Generations." There were any number of stories that portrayed the gathering as a kind of intra-generational show of solidarity, omitting the fairly obvious point that had the oldest woman decided to abort, there be no three generations to gather!

But besides the paltry coverage given to the pro-life press conference, one of the more seriously unfair components of the coverage was the use of an overhead aerial shot of marchers walking down Constitution Avenue that ran in a number of papers. Let me explain why.

When the massive Rally for Life was held in 1990, sponsored by NRLC, the crowd was absolutely enormous. It seemed as if every square foot of the National Mall was covered with pro-lifers. While there was no scientific method by which either that Rally or April's march was gauged, those who attended the Rally tell me it was at least as large as the April 25 gathering.