All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Public Eye takes you back to 1965, when abortions were not legal in the United States. In this broadcast, Walter Cronkite reported on the "legal, moral and medical aspects" of the abortion debate in America and around the globe..Click on the video box to watch.

Rudy Giuliani got some flack for his handling of the abortion issue at the first Republican presidential debate. ("It would be OK" if the Supreme Court upholds Roe V. Wade, he said. Also, "it would be OK to repeal it." Oh, and it "would be OK also if a strict constructionist viewed it as precedent." OK then!)

The rest of the GOP pack was more on message on the issue, using it as an opportunity to throw some red meat to the conservative base: Sam Brownback, for example, said the overturning of the 1973 abortion decision would be a "glorious day of human liberty and freedom."

Giuliani has been trying to keep the issue from hurting him with prospective primary voters, and based on the polls, he has been able to pull it off so far. But the sudden emergence of the news that "in the '90s he contributed money at least six times to Planned Parenthood, one of the country's leading abortion rights groups and its top provider of abortions" is going to complicated matters.

The press corps now has a pretty strong piece of information to cite in efforts to nail down Giuliani's position on the issue, and that makes it a lot harder for him to keep from saying something that will alienate a significant number of voters.

Giuliani, as the Politico points out, has been trying for a somewhat nuanced approach on the issue on the campaign trail. He says he is "against abortion. I hate it. I wish there never was an abortion, and I would counsel a woman to have an adoption instead of an abortion." But he also "understands it is a personal and emotional decision that should ultimately be left up to the woman," according to a spokesperson.

That's a legitimate position, but it sure sounds like a fancy way of saying "pro-choice." And that's not what many Republican primary voters want to hear. Now that reporters have Giuliani's Planned Parenthood contributions to cite, he has less leeway to hedge on the issue.

Consider what Clemson University political science professor Dave Woodard told Jonathan Martin: "This isn't something like where your position is misunderstood. An overt act of giving money shows support for a position. That can't be a mistake or misinterpretation."

If not for the Virginia Tech tragedy, the top story on CBSNews.com right now would likely be the decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. People on opposite sides of contentious issues like this often use certain terminology to try to frame the debate – see the "death tax" vs. "estate tax" argument. In this case, some, including President Bush, prefer the phrase "partial birth abortion," while others favor "late term abortion."

In covering the story, CBSNews.com has decided to go with this phrasing whenever possible: "what the law calls a partial birth abortion."

CBSNews.com Editorial Director (and sometime PE poster) Dick Meyer explained why.

"Both 'late term abortion' and 'partial birth abortion' are now phrases that signify a position, so we will use this phrasing though it is cumbersome," wrote Meyer in an email.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will be hearing the case of Gonzales v. Carhart, which is effectively a constitutional test of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. With the case approaching, CBS News Senior Vice President, Standards and Special Projects Linda Mason sent an email to the CBS News staff regarding the terms "late term abortion" and "partial birth abortion." Mason wrote that CBS News should use the term “late term abortion” when referring to the procedure in question, not "partial birth abortion." I asked her why.

"We thought that 'partial birth' is a color phrase for people who are anti-abortion rights," said Mason. "This is a procedure usually done after 20 weeks. Therefore, 'late term' is appropriate. Now, some colleagues have come back to me and questioned this because the name of the law before the Supreme Court is the 'Partial-Birth Abortion.' When people refer to the case, they should call it by the correct name. But a CBS reporter should call the procedure a 'late term abortion.'"

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If the third-rail of American politics is Social Security (and I think the president has shown it probably still is in many ways), then its equal for the media may very well be the abortion debate. Touching it doesn’t mean certain harm but it almost inevitably means you’re going to make one side or the other angry. Unlike politicians and Social Security though, it’s not something the media can ignore. So when I saw a question raised about it in the comments section of a completely unrelated entry, I felt it important to address.



The essence of the question from ikez78 is thus:

Why does CBS continue to present abortion supporters as ‘abortion rights’ people in their newscasts?

In fact, CBS News has a policy of how to characterize the two sides of this fight. In most public discourse those who support legalized abortion are commonly known as “pro-choice” while those opposed to it are frequently referred to as “pro-life.” At CBS News, they are termed “pro-abortion rights” and “anti-abortion rights.” Here’s how Linda Mason, the senior vice president for standards and practices, explains it:

We wanted to take the most neutral way to characterize people who support and oppose abortion, to call them pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion rights as opposed to using pro-choice and pro-life. We tried to keep it in the most neutral way that we can – to not offer opinion one way or the other.

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