Posted by
"Happy" Jake Greene on Thursday, October 01, 2009 7:18:03 AM
I did a little internet search this morning in an attempt to prove a point. And I succeeded. I searched the name James Pouillon to see if any new information had come out on his story. Pouillon, if you don’t recall, was the anti-abortion activist who was killed a few weeks ago with little media fanfare. I posted my rant on the topic on this blog on 17 September. In the search I did, you had to go four pages deep to find anything more recent than that. What I did notice this time – and missed last time because I didn’t search on his name – was that his son, James M., apparently has been quoted as saying that the elder Pouillon “didn’t care about abortion” but was just a misogynist who “wanted to scream at women.” Of course, this allegation got a fair amount of play in smaller (probably fringe Left) publications and made up about a fifth of my search results. Interestingly such stories didn’t seem to be in the big media, so one has to wonder how much credibility it has.
Sticking with his son’s alleged comments for a moment, speaking ill of the deceased is generally in bad taste, since the deceased cannot defend themselves. Publicly speaking ill of a very recently deceased close family member who died violently crosses the bounds of common decency and is indicative of other issues. What kind of man would accuse his own father – who had been gunned down for holding a sign less than a week earlier – of any sort of bad behavior – true or not – in the media?! Pretending that it’s true, for a moment, it doesn’t change the fact that the elder Pouillon was shot dead and that the murderer is quoted as saying he didn’t like the sign Pouillon was holding. It also doesn’t change the fact that Pouillon was simply holding the sign. There is no indication he was harassing anyone. It also doesn’t change the fact that this story has been essentially buried since 12 September, and almost completely unreported in the media since 17 September.
There's still very little news on the prosecution of Harlan James Drake. Aside from the younger Pouillon's classless interviews, there have been no retrospectives on the elder Pouillon's life. There has, of course, been no talk about any violent fringe on the Left side of the abortion debate or how such fringe is a lot closer to the "mainstream" pro-abortionists than they would like you to believe (I'm not saying any of that is true, but if you believe the media, it is the gospel truth about the anti-abortion fringe.) The best the media does with the murder of an anti-abortion activist is report as little as possible about the story to start with, then bury it once the initial wave stops, only bringing it back to the surface for a moment when someone comes forward to disparage the victim.
"Journalistic integrity" my foot.
HJG