11/08/00 Update: According to the Politex Ticker at Bushwatch.com, columnist Liz Smith's November 6th column was suppressed by both the New York Post and Newsday for mentioning my article on the media's failure to report a Bush abortion story. It's just too hot for mainstream media to handle. Here's the full story from Politex:
POLITEX TICKER...LAST UPDATED 8:00 CT, 11/7/00..."Buried in the middle of [today's] Armey
Archerd piece is the blockbuster that on Mon. Nov 6 Liz Smith ran an item in her column about Larry Flynt and the GW Bush abortion. That item was CENSORED by both the NY Post and NY Newsday. It ran in the N.J. Star Ledger." --Lynn Samuels...
HERE'S THE LIZ SMITH ITEM THAT WAS TOO HOT FOR THE NY POST AND NEWSDAY - "Hot on the heels of the George W. Bush DUI revelation (in Maine it's called OUI - Operating Under the Influence), comes word that porn-king muckraker Larry Flynt is charging that a girlfriend of W's back in 1970 had an abortion. But that's not the story as there's no evidence that Bush even knew about the pregnancy. The real story according to the Internet's About.com - is that Flynt's remarks were apparently censored from CNN's 'Crossfire' and the entire transcript of the show vanished from the CNN Web site. The media has been willing to crucify Bill and Hillary Clinton with the worst possible sort of specious rumor-mongering, so why was this sleazy tidbit too hot for the 'responsible' press to ask about?"
10/31/00: Media Doesn't Ask About Bush Abortion Story
Did George W. Bush get a girlfriend pregnant in 1970? Did she have an abortion?
Muckraker Larry Flynt says so, and Larry Flynt has always been accurate in what he says about politicians and their sex lives before. Hypocritical Republicans like Bob Livingston—who had to resign as Speaker of the House of Representatives when Flynt exposed his adulteries—have learned to dread hearing that Flynt is on their case.
So why is this story being ignored and even censored by American news organizations?
If you're Internet-savvy, you've probably heard about the story. But if your main source of news is the traditional media—newspapers and television—you probably haven't.
And nobody is quite sure why.
Larry Flynt went public with the question on CNN's "Crossfire" back on October 20. The transcript of that show was first edited to remove Flynt's comments about Bush's girlfriend's abortion. Then the transcript of the entire show disappeared from CNN's web site.
Virtually no other print or television news sources in America have picked it up, although the BBC has mentioned it.
And that's the real story here, not whether George W. Bush was involved in an abortion. Have the news sources who were falling over themselves to report every rumor about Bill Clinton—with absolutely no corroboration—suddenly been overcome by journalistic ethics? Have we returned to the days when no story was reported unless confirmed by at least two independent sources?
It's not as if the media have been unwilling to trouble Bush in the past. Questions about George W.'s cocaine use were everywhere for a while during the primary campaign, and Bush's reluctance to deny having used the drug certainly added fuel to that fire. And while Larry Flynt is a sleazemeister as well as a muckraker, the media were happy to report his charges against the Republican sex hypocrites involved in Clinton's impeachment.
Perhaps the traditional media have been reluctant to pick up the Bush abortion story because they don't want to introduce such a potentially explosive topic with the outcome of this presidential election up for grabs. The Bush campaign and the Republican party are avoiding the issue of abortion altogether, knowing that Bush will lose the election if voters realize that he plans to do away with a woman's right to choose.
But web-based news sources haven't been as cautious. Several web sites, including the American Atheists and American Politics Journal sites, have reported not only Flynt's charges but CNN's censorship of the "Crossfire" transcript.
Less seriously, anti-abortion web journalist Matt Drudge—who claimed to have found Bill Clinton's illegitimate child with an African American prostitute not long ago (DNA tests proved the boy wasn't Clinton's)—reported that his anonymous sources say the Bush story isn't true. Not to be outdone, "America's Best Christian" Betty Bowers weighed in with her own parody: "Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer responded by saying 'Governor Bush has not changed his
position on abortion. He is no hypocrite. It was illegal when he had it done and he wants it
to be illegal for everyone else, too. Fair is fair.' "
Internet discussion forums and Usenet news groups are abuzz with the issue as well.
Flynt also appeared on San Francisco's KGO talk radio, an ABC affiliate. He told host Bernie Ward that he has affidavits from four witnesses about the Bush story, but said he has no evidence that Bush encouraged the abortion or even knew his girlfriend was pregnant.
Flynt says he can't publish the story because the woman involved refuses to corroborate it. In an online chat at the CNN web site, which has now vanished too, Flynt noted that "without her willingness, we don't feel that we're on solid enough legal ground to go
with the story, because should she say it never happened, then we've got a potential libel suit.
But we know we have enough evidence that we believe completely.
"One of the things that
interested us," Flynt added, "was that this abortion took place before Roe vs. Wade, in 1970, which made it a
crime at the time. I'd just like the national media to ask him if abortion is okay for him and his
family, but not for the rest of America."
Why haven't the media asked?
By Margaret Sykes
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