The Gray Lady Bows to Her Peers?!?!?

Amy Welborn may be right about that infernal cold front moving in! She demonstrates the evidence from the NY Times itself! Behold:

eanine F. Pirro, the new Republican challenger for Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate seat, said yesterday that she opposed the procedure that critics call partial-birth abortion, after taking a muddier stance on the issue four years ago.

Then, to provide the context for this amazing development, she turns to Get Religion and a conversation she had with Terry Mattingly:

Welborn sums up the basic thesis:

(Woodward) begins by noting the difficulties of defining and naming this procedure from 1995, when it first came to public attention and Clinton vetoed a bill banning it. The difficulty is that it’s not a medical term (but then, neither is “heart attack”) and that the medical community had not named it, mostly because it was a procedure not performed by reputable physicians, for the most part. It was an underground procedure. Once names were determined (Intact dilation and extraction), for example, they were too awkward for headline writers. So even though “partial-birth” abortion was the term of choice for pro-life advocates, it became the most popular way to refer to it, in journalism, usually in scare quotes or with “what opponents call” attached to it.

But not . . . Woodward notes . . . in the NYTimes which steadfastly refused to use the term at all, even in scare quotes, even without the modifier.

The Times jumped through row after row of journalistic hoops to avoid the actual words that were being used in this heated public, political and legal debate. Clearly, notes Welborn, this is a matter of journalistic dogma. The newspaper’s point is that “partial-birth abortion” does not exist if the Times does not say it exists. This horrific procedure is, merely, a myth created for political purposes by those who are opposed to abortion on demand.

Yet now...what? The Gray Lady gives up the ghost? The NY Times begins to admit that perhaps "partial birth abortion"--still a slander imposed by "anti-abortion" woman-haters--may, in fact, exist as some type of procedure?

It's almost a tacit admission on the part of this venerable MSM institution. The NY Times leads; she does not follow. Except now, she does follow. The first crack in the Gray Lady's facade as the "paper of record" begins to appear. I'm under no illusions that the NY Times will plummet from the sky like a modern-day Icarus. Anchors of Network darlings like the Today Show will still read the Times to plan their coverage. But the Lady has flown too close to the sun of institutional hubris. Blair and the out-scooping by Bloggers may have begun to take their toll on her.

I'm sure I can still expect those wonderful Reasonable perspectives from "the paper of record" extolling the privatization of morality and public reverence of Moloch's sacrament, abortion. Still, it's comforting to know that, at long last, the NY Times blinked.

Update: Then again, maybe not:

Just got an email from Ken Woodward who says that the Times has used this kind of language -- "that critics call...." -- in the past.

This means I misunderstood his piece. I thought that he had argued that the Times refused to print the words "partial-birth abortion" at all.

Posted by: tmatt at August 10, 2005 11:44 AM