Here and There, May 28

The Hugh Hewitt Show, what a find. Today's high point: a phone interview with Mark Steyn, who just returned from a trip to Iraq. Believe it or not, Steyn rented a car in Jordan and motored around Iraq, where he found the situation to be not nearly as bad as what you read about in, say, the New York Times. You know how some Americans abroad pretend to be Canadian to avoid provoking the locals? In this case, Steyn was leery of flashing the Maple Leaf so he wouldn't have to admit that his country didn't do very much to help liberate the Iraqis ... Hopefully there will be much more about this trip on Steyn's web site.

Hewitt continues to bash the L.A. Times, this time for a leaked (and very strange) memorandum from editor-in-chief John Carroll, admitting liberal bias in the paper's coverage of a story on new abortion legislation in Texas.

I'm concerned about the perception---and the occasional reality---that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

[read the whole memo]
I happen to think that abortion is a deeply personal matter that the state has no business regulating any more than it regulates other medical procedures. Still, a woman contemplating an abortion should be able to obtain credible, unbiased information about the various risks of terminating (or not terminating) a pregnancy. There are many questions here: Does abortion increase the risk of breast cancer? How credible is the evidence for or against? Does the Texas legislature routinely mandate that physicians give their patients specific warnings prior to performing other procedures, or is abortion being singled out here? I don't know enough to answer these questions. My pro-choice bias would tend to make me skeptical of this law. Yet I would hope that a major newspaper like the L.A. Times would provide enough unbiased information so that I can reach an informed opinion, rather than leap to a prejudiced opinion. The memo reinforces the perception that the Times is too narrowly liberal (not to mention scientifically illiterate) to do the job. And if it allows its biases to color this particular story, I also wonder where else they're "adding value" by filtering the news for me.

Which brings us back to Robert Scheer. a.ka. Robert "Where's Elmo" Scheer. An L.A. reader writes:

Yesterday's (5/27) L.A. Times Op-Ed page had a note that Robert Scheer's column, which normally appears on Tuesdays, would appear today. It's not there today, either. Curious.

It's not on his archive yet either. It is unusual, though not unprecedented for Scheer to skip his column for a week. Is "Santa Monica's favorite columnist", (no really), on a well-deserved vacation? Did the Times spike the column? Is Scheer in Iraq trying to produce sources to validate last week's piece? Is he working double-time to force himself to write something that isn't insanely and mendaciously anti-American? Either way, we're all waiting for his next emission with unprecedented anticipation.

In the meantime, go read FrontPageMag.com's April 2 profile: Robert Scheer, Gucci Marxist

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 28, 2003 08:57 PM