But it was the anecdotal beginning
Always be sure to fact-check the rapes. Bitches lie, you know, especially when they’re ten years old. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler was on the case:
This is the account of a one-source story that quickly went viral around the world — and into the talking points of the president.
The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a right to abortion, has led a number of states to quickly impose new laws to restrict or limit abortions. Ohio was one of the first, imposing a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape and incest.
On July 1, the Indianapolis Star, also known as the IndyStar, published an article, written by the newspaper’s medical writer, about how women seeking abortions had begun traveling from Ohio to Indiana, where less restrictive abortion laws were still in place. “Patients head to Indiana for abortion services as other states restrict care,” the article was headlined.
That was a benign headline. But it was the anecdotal beginning that caught the attention of other news organizations. The article said that three days after the June 24 court ruling, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, Caitlan Bernard, who performs abortions, received a call from “a child abuse doctor” in Ohio who had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio, “the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care,” the Star reported.
We get several more paragraphs on the lack of corroboration for this story, and at the end he sums up:
This is a very difficult story to check. Bernard is on the record, but obtaining documents or other confirmation is all but impossible without details that would identify the locality where the rape occurred.
With news reports around the globe and now a presidential imprimatur, however, the story has acquired the status of a “fact” no matter its provenance. If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding.
Below that there’s an update saying the story has been confirmed.
Fact checking is obviously a good and necessary thing, but it’s not equally obvious why Kessler saw fit to single out this one for an actual story.
Yes, journalism is, among other things, an accumulation of facts, but it’s a lot of other things too. It’s a choice of what to cover, for instance, and a choice of how to cover it, and sometimes even a questioning of reasons for covering it.
H/t Screechy Monkey
Kessler is the same “fact checker” who declared that Bernie Sanders had said something false that was absolutely true.
Sanders said that ““millions of Americans are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive.”
Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed that 8 million Americans worked more than one job. Kessler whined that this is only 5% of working Americans…. which is a complete non sequitur, as Sanders said nothing about a percentage, and “millions” was indisputably true.
Kessler’s other gripe was that many of those jobs were part-time which… yeah, Sanders didn’t say they all worked two full-time jobs.
Now, if Kessler wanted to say “so what, this isn’t a big deal, and we shouldn’t change our labor policies because of it,” fine — I might even agree — but that’s a policy argument. Instead he tried to hide his political beef as a “fact check.”
The point is that Kessler made no particular effort to fact check the story. At least none that would have required him to leave his desk. When he (and others) drew a quick blank, for some reason they chose to cast doubt. Never mind the number of ‘unnamed sources’ stories they’ve previously breathlessly presented. I saw a tweet yesterday from the sole journalist present at the rapists arraignment. They clearly wondered why they were the sole journalist there.
Also, so many right wingers and right to lifers outright lying about the situation and what the laws in both States actually say.
Jesus that part time thing – lots of people have to work two or more part time jobs BECAUSE employers carefully keep workers just under full time so that they don’t have to provide benefits. I’ve worked that kind of job myself, and the employer in question was the City of Seattle. (There was a lawsuit and after that we got extra pay to fill in the missing benefits.) It’s an utterly commonplace ploy and it’s one major reason a lot of people who work 40 or more hours a week remain in poverty.You’d think Kessler would know that!
It’s not as like it’s a Twitter rape allegation… The laws do what they do and child rape is common so even if this specific story wasn’t true (turns out it was) there would be one just like it in the near future. Moral clarity for the most part is bullshit, but one ought to be able to do a thought experiment and conclude that pre-existing conditions make this abortion case inevitable.