The Media’s Fear of Pro-Life: The Boston Globe and WGBH Public Television

John C. Rankin

[excerpted and adapted from First the Gospel, Then Politics …, 1999, Vol. 2, not published]

The Boston Globe

In the 1980s, the media covered Operation Rescue (OR) in depth, I believe, partly because it made good sound bites for the abortion-rights activists in their condemnation of the blockade and other violative tactics. But even in so doing, and in focusing the issue away from the nature of human abortion itself, they still biased their coverage highly.

For example, I say no to blockade and its cognate tactics. Nonetheless, the OR participants, almost without exception in their nearly 100,000 arrests, only engaged in passive resistance. And they deserve respect for this restraint. But the television news would show clips of people pressing against a police blockade trying to forcibly break through it, and yelling vulgarities. It would run these clips in a context where the casual observer would identify these people with Operation Rescue. Yet in reality it was the abortion-rights activists behaving this way. The sad reality is that this bias is part of the fruit invariably reaped by blockade tactics – it brings out the worst in others as they react and become more self-justified.

But the media ignored us as much as possible, in the Sacred Assemblies for the Unborn (SAU). I believe because they could not make a negative caricature out of what we were doing, and because we were going for their minds too. We defined the terms and language of the event, and they could not stomach it. At our first assembly, it was the only time, with one minor exception, that I noticed any media present – a Boston Globe reporter spent much of her time just looking at our questions. But in her brief article, as I recall, there was no focus on the substance of the issues they raised. The only focus was on our non-blockade presence as being distinct from that of OR.

I remember the night before the June 3, 1989 event, realizing that the media’s likely strategy was to try portray a division among pro-lifers – to try to get us to do some finger-pointing against OR, and to use such accusations to profile an intramural squabble. I could imagine their story line: “Pro-life leader Condemns Operation Rescue,” or “Anti-Abortion Movement Splits,” etc. And since I disagreed deeply with the tactic of blockade, and was trying to present an alternative – which I would have been delighted to have accomplished before OR came on the scene – I did not know how I would answer such a question.

My agenda was positive, yet due to OR’s prominence, and due to the fact that I wanted to honor the pro-life commitment of most of its recruits while not endorsing their tactics, I faced a quandary. Not being able to come up with a simple sound-bite answer ahead of time, I took Mark 13:11 seriously (understanding the different exact context), and trusted that if such a question were posed, then the Holy Spirit would give me the right words:

“Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit.”

The next morning, in the brief interview the Globe reporter had with me, she cut to the chase: “What is the difference between your group and Operation Rescue?”

And indeed, the Holy Spirit gave me words in simplicity and power I had not composed beforehand: “The difference is simple: Operation Rescue believes the time has arrived for civil disobedience, and we do not believe it has yet arrived.”

A parallel passage to Mark 13 is in Luke 21, which adds the following words of Jesus:

“For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict (v. 15).

This happened here and it happens elsewhere. But only by depending wholly on the grace of God in Christ Jesus.  She had no further questions on this subject, and nothing on it in the article the next day. I did not have to get into the nature of civil obedience and civil disobedience, and the criteria for a justifiable political revolution. A simple answer answered a simple question.

For me to embrace civil disobedience, it would not be in vigilante protest (biblically defined civil prophetic protest is far more powerful as it is), but only if a lawless state sought to have me disobey the love of God and love of neighbor in tangible action.