Can Women Reporters Write Objectively on Abortion Issue?

For obvious reasons, abortion is an intensely personal issue for most women in a way that it is not for men. Indeed, the editors of 17 women’s magazines met with leading abortion rights advocates last year to discuss what they could do to help “protect” legalized abortion.

But magazines thrive on the expression of personal viewpoints; newspapers and television news organizations want their reporters to keep personal feelings out of their stories.

Can women reporters do that when covering abortion?

“If you are a woman reporter under the age of about 50 . . . you are writing about something that could happen to you,” says Cynthia Gorney, who covers abortion for the Washington Post. “You’re going to have a view on it . . . . There’s no way you can set that aside. The issue is whether you can, while holding that view, listen . . . seriously . . . to people of all stripes on this issue . . . and really do what reporters are supposed to do . . . shed light and make clear why people hold the positions that they do.”

Most women reporters say they’re able to do this. But many say they have to work harder to do so on abortion than on any other issue. Some fail.

A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington last year found that women reporters for five major news organizations quoted supporters of abortion rights twice as often as they quoted abortion opponents in their stories. The gender gap was greatest--3 to 1--in stories by women reporters in the print media.

The study, which involved nine months of abortion coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post and the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programs, found that in abortion stories reported by men, the use of sources from the two sides was “evenly balanced.”

News executives at all these organizations deny any charges of bias. They say their reporters, men and women alike, are professionals long accustomed to keeping their personal feelings from interfering with their professional obligations to be fair. The reporters also deny any bias.

But one longtime network news executive, speaking on condition that he not be identified, disagreed vigorously.

“The problem (with abortion coverage), pure and simple, is that the media’s loaded with women who are strongly pro-choice,” he said.

A few women reporters with strong feelings on abortion have asked not to write stories on the subject, precisely so they can avoid any possible or even apparent conflict of interest.

When Vicky Hendley, a reporter for the Vero Beach Press-Journal, made such a request last year, her editors agreed. But when controversy developed over her having mailed tiny coat hangers to every Florida state legislator to express her concern that new laws could prompt a return to dangerous, illegal abortions, she was fired.

What Hendley did “undermined the paper’s credibility,” says Richard Wagner, the managing editor.

Editors at The Los Angeles Times reacted differently when Patt Morrison approached them last year with her own dilemma.

Morrison, a longtime Times reporter, went to her editor after Operation Rescue announced plans to blockade abortion clinics in Southern California. She said she felt so strongly about the issue that she wanted to help escort pregnant women into the clinics, past the protesters. But she said she didn’t want to put The Times in “an awkward position.”

Morrison and Noel Greenwood, then deputy managing editor of the paper, discussed the issue and agreed that she shouldn’t cover any abortion stories.

Could Morrison have covered them fairly?

“There were moments, probably in the wake of the demonstrations, when I was angry enough that I could not have written dispassionately about the matter,” she says. At other times, Morrison says, she’s sufficiently confident of her professionalism that she thinks she could have “set my feelings aside.”

Did Greenwood consider forbidding her to participate in the clinic action on the grounds that her presence could undermine the paper’s credibility?

“That was one of the options,” Greenwood says, “but if she felt so strongly about it, I decided I should respect that. . . .”

The Los Angeles Times, like the New York Times and some other news organizations, has a policy prohibiting staffers from participating in any activity that involves an issue they cover. Some other news organizations--the Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer among them--have a more stringent rule: Staffers are prohibited from taking part in any activity that could compromise the paper’s credibility, even if they’re not covering the issue involved.

But a number of women reporters--and some male reporters--either forgot about, ignored or were unaware of these policies last year; they joined a huge abortion-rights march in Washington less than three weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to hear oral arguments in the Webster case, which the Bush Administration hoped to use to begin to make abortion illegal.

Among the marchers was Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

“I was there in a totally personal, anonymous capacity with some college classmates,” Greenhouse says. “My intent was not to make any kind of statement as a journalist.

“Most of my colleagues thought I was a jerk to be there,” Greenhouse concedes, “and they let me know that, either politely or impolitely.”

Eileen McNamara, who covered abortion for most of 1989 at the Boston Globe, says Greenhouse made “a terrible mistake” in marching--and the Times “made a bad mistake in allowing her to continue to cover the issue.”

Abortion opponents seized on Greenhouse’s participation--and that of other reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post and other news organizations--as proof of the media’s “bias” on abortion.

Several news organizations then quickly restated their policies prohibiting participation in demonstrations and similar activities. But no one who marched was fired or prohibited from writing about abortion in the future.

Does Greenhouse agree that she shouldn’t have marched?

“I’m glad I was there as a person,” she says. “I accept my editors’ judgment that as a New York Times employee, I should not have been there.”

Greenhouse’s reporting, before and after the march, is widely considered fair by both sides, and some journalists say that’s all that matters. But the media has given more scrutiny in recent years to conflicts of interest, actual and potential, involving the people and institutions they cover, and this has led to greater efforts within the media to avoid any situations in which they could even appear to have a similar conflict.

That’s why two editors at a small Iowa newspaper were fired in April when they refused to end their affiliation with an anti-abortion group they helped found; that’s also why the Milwaukee Journal fired a part-time newsroom secretary last year for picketing abortion clinics.

Editors at both papers said they took action to preserve the credibility of their news-gathering operations. In fact, before firing the secretary, Diane Dew, the Journal offered her a job in another, non-news department, where that wouldn’t be a problem. She refused.

Dew then filed a complaint against the Journal with the Equal Rights Division of the State Department of Industry, Labor and Human Relations; the Journal backed down and conceded that its application of the paper’s ethics code to Dew was “overly broad” and constituted an infringement of her freedom of expression.

Although editors at the various publications whose employees have participated in abortion activities all insist they would have taken exactly the same actions if their employees had been on the other side of the debate, abortion opponents refuse to believe that.

Firing a secretary who demonstrates against abortion but not even changing the assignment of a Supreme Court reporter who demonstrates for abortion rights seems to abortion opponents symbolic of the double standard they say permeates media coverage of abortion.