Just for the fun of it, let’s pretend that Reuters is a student in a Journalism 101 course and not an international wire service that touts its dedication to upholding “freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.”
Let’s pretend that this beginning student turned in a story on a study concerning abortion and conscience laws.
Let’s pretend that the story — reporting only one side of a controversial issue — came from the student and not Reuters.
What might we tell the student?
Well, first let’s check out the lede:
(Reuters Health) – The vast majority of U.S. states have passed laws blocking civil lawsuits that might result from a doctor refusing to perform an abortion or certain other medical procedures because of religious beliefs, a new study shows.
The national survey found that 46 states had laws protecting medical professionals and institutions from being sued for harm to patients related to a refusal to provide services out of conscience, researchers report in JAMA.
Not bad.
Not bad at all.
But then the story quotes a source who will interpret the news above:
“The biggest takeaway from this research is that while people are aware that conscience laws may impact a woman’s right to access reproductive services, they may not know that these laws also may impact access to the legal system when they are injured as a result of conscientious refusal,” said the study’s author, Nadia Sawicki, Georgia Reithal Professor of Law at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.
“The majority of patients have no idea whether their local hospital is religiously affiliated,” Sawicki said. “So they don’t know if there are providers who can’t provide services. I hope this research brings to light the very real impact that conscience laws have not just on access to care but also on the right to legal recovery in cases where the patient is injured.”
Again, that’s not bad.
Not bad at all.
I mean, it makes total sense to quote the story’s author up high.
But here’s where we get into the question of whether Reuters — the student, I mean — is doing news or PR for the study’s author.
Will any sources be given an opportunity to interpret the news in a different way? Will any religious freedom experts be quoted? Will any doctors who oppose abortion be given an opportunity to comment?
Or will the story be told entirely from the perspective of the study’s author?
(A quick aside: As we have noted repeatedly here at GetReligion, ample evidence supports the notion of rampant news media bias against abortion opponents, as noted in a classic Los Angeles Times series by the late David Shaw way back in 1990.)
Keep reading, and only one other source is quoted. Again, it’s one who prefers that doctors be required to perform abortions over being able to exercise their personal religious beliefs against doing so:
The study shows that the majority of states have given more weight to the providers’ rights than to the patients’ needs, said Dr. Albert Wu, an internist and professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It’s “disturbing that patients in 37 states do not have a right to those services and that patients have been injured as a result,” Wu said. “It’s a widely held belief that the patients should come first.”
“This crosses a line to the point where employee rights are encroaching on patients’ rights,” Wu said. “I think patients need more safeguards to make sure their right to health is not trumped by the preferences of medical professionals.”
Wu certainly sounds like an appropriate source for the story.
The problem — which we need to explain to the student as we teach him or her how to do fair, accurate journalism — is that an impartial news story ought to reflect all sides, not just one.
Hopefully, the student will be receptive to this message and improve the story in his or her next draft.
As for Reuters? Well, that global news organization should know better. But then again, so many mainstream media organizations have a real hard time covering abortion fairly.
Ho-hum. This exercise wasn’t as much fun as I hoped it would be.
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