Gosnell trial revealed horrors of abortion, media silence

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Mengele. Kevorkian. Now Gosnell can be added to that awful list. Men who perverted the idea that medicine should indeed “first do no harm.”

Dr. Kermit Gosnell was on trial for his life for the first degree murder of four babies born as a result of a failed late-term abortion. The American media that had resisted covering the gruesome case were also on trial.

Both were found guilty.

Followers of the Philadelphia case weren’t surprised with either result. 

The facts in the Gosnell case read more like a demon’s resume than a description of a man sworn to heal.

Gosnell is a monster. He was initially charged “with killing seven babies born alive," along with Karnamaya Mongar a newly-arrived, 41-year-old refugee from Bhutan. 

Prosecutors say Gosnell's staff gave the 90-pound woman a lethal dose of anesthesia and painkillers during a 2009 abortion,” according to the Associated Press. Some charges were dropped and he was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder, as well as “211 counts of failing to comply with a state law that requires a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion is performed.”

The facts read more like a demon’s resume than a description of a man sworn to heal. One former worker testified that she saw “a late-term baby who survived an abortion ‘swimming’ in a toilet and ‘trying to get out.’” 

Another child reportedly was big enough “that Gosnell joked it could have walked to the bus.” Child after child had life ended as scissors snipped spinal cords, decapitating them.

Yet this “house of horrors” would never have seen the light of day if the American media had their way. 

Major outlets ignored the story until conservative anger called them out. The Media Research Center (where I work), Kirsten Powers, Fox News Channel, some in Congress and an army of conservatives on Twitter provided part of the pressure.

Even then, news coverage was paltry – far less than outlets would devote to any story du jour from Manti Te’o and his invisible girlfriend to endless accounts of the Jodi Arias trial.

ABC was the worst. It took that network a couple years after the arrest and 56 straight days of trial to acknowledge Gosnell existed. ABC found more than three hours of air time for other court cases during that time, but waited until Gosnell was convicted before it ever admitted he was even on trial.

“Nightline” co-anchor Terry Moran inadvertently admitted the network’s failure during the May 13 “World News with Diane Sawyer” segment. “For two months, jurors heard often shocking, grisly testimony.” Yes, two months of “shocking, grisly testimony” and only one minute and 51 seconds of news coverage at the very end.

In short, if you rely on ABC for your news coverage, you are out of luck. It’s that kind of timely newsgathering that would have viewers expecting to see reports on the end of WWII or the sinking of the Titanic later this week.

The other two members of the Big Three didn’t impress either. NBC was bad and CBS only a little better. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie asked Obama a question about Gosnell but didn’t even bother to follow it up. And when NBC finally gave an actual report on the case on May 1, it hid the awful nature of the case. The network that had reported on the smell of a decomposing body in the Casey Anthony trial called Gosnell’s crimes “too gruesome” to tell viewers.

Other outlets were just as averse to reporting the awful story of baby murder. The Washington Post committed to the story after health reporter Sarah Kliff defended her own failure to cover Gosnell because it was a “local crime” story.

But it wasn’t a local crime story. It was part of a national belief in infanticide coming directly from the pro-abortion movement. Just in the time of the Gosnell trial, we’ve seen a Planned Parenthood lobbyist and an abortion doctor both show support for baby murder after the child is born.

Abortion lobbyist Alisa LaPolt Snow told an astonished hearing that the life of a baby born after a botched abortion should be “left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”

The pro-life group Live Action caught a D.C. abortion doctor in an embarrassing admission of, you know, supporting baby murder. “One video features a D.C. doctor, Cesare Santangelo, who said that in the unlikely event that an abortion resulted in a live birth, ‘we would not help it,’” reported the Post. For that reveal, he said he considers the heroes of Live Action to be “terrorists.”

That is the world that Kermit Gosnell introduced to America. It’s a world where the liberal fantasies of “safe, available and rare” abortions have been twisted into a convenient rationale for taxpayer-funded baby murder, even after a child is born. It’s an image the abortion community won’t be able to erase.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

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Of mics and men: Fox News has never tried to silence me

By the time I got to the "Fox & Friends" studio on Nov. 2, I was already steaming mad. Based on reporting by us and others, parents of two of our heroes lost in Benghazi were accusing the president of the United States of murder; of refusing to send help to our besieged and desperate personnel under attack in Libya.

The parents’ outrage and heartbreak was understandable because it was based on the premise that there were either armed drones or fighter jets or an AC-130 gunship or a team of Special Operators that could have intervened at least in time to save the two U.S. personnel killed seven hours after the initial attack. But help was never sent, the parents believed, because the Obama administration was incompetent, lazy or worse.

Having already spoken with highly placed sources in the Pentagon, and also having spoken at length with retired Gen. Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, by Nov. 2 I knew that we had no military assets in the region that could have saved those precious lives, none.

So when my friend and colleague Eric Bolling made the allegation of willful inaction by the Obama administration on "Fox & Friends" that morning, I pounced, furious that what I perceived to be a false narrative was being used unfairly to attack the president on the eve of the election just five days away.

While my appearances on the morning show every Friday for the last 12 years are often noteworthy for their vigorous debate, this confrontation was unusual for its incivility. I was so angry, Steve Doocy, the host sitting alongside me on the curvy couch, had to restrain me physically from leaping to my feet.

It certainly wasn’t your typical morning fare, and Eric and I felt compelled afterward to shake hands and write it off to the passions of the moment, agreeing to disagree on the availability of military assets in the region.

At no time then or ever has my boss, Roger Ailes, or anyone at Fox News cut my microphone to prevent me from speaking. Not one time, ever. Further, although our executive producer, Bill Shine, says he did tell the morning show producers to move on to another topic, I do not believe the segment was cut any shorter than normal, nor does the tape of the show indicate any audio editing or content censoring took place. It was live TV, raw and unedited.

Indeed, that night on the "O’Reilly Factor," Bill and I argued over the same point Eric and I had battled over on "Fox & Friends." If Fox News wanted to silence me, they would not have allowed me 12 hours later to say to O’Reilly that we owed the president an apology.

According to a tweet today, author Jonathan Alter, who makes the charge that Roger ordered my mic cut, says he called my office and that nobody denied the allegation. I like Jonathan and think he’s an excellent reporter, but he never spoke to me and never asked me to respond to the specific allegation he later published.

I’m sure there are many times that Roger would love to cut my mic. The fact that he has always allowed me to speak my mind is testament to his integrity and to the editorial honesty of the network he created.

Geraldo Rivera is Senior Columnist for Fox News Latino.

Follow us on twitter.com/foxnewslatino
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Geraldo Rivera

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When the government demands silence -- the ugliness of the Patriot Act

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  July 28, 2011: Shown here is the Capitol dome on Capitol Hill in Washington.AP

In 1798, when John Adams was president of the United States, the feds enacted four pieces of legislation called the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of these laws made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing -- even if true -- about the president or the federal government, notwithstanding the guarantee of free speech in the First Amendment.

The feds used these laws to torment their adversaries in the press and even successfully prosecuted a congressman who heavily criticized the president. Then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson vowed that if he became president, these abominable laws would expire. He did, and they did, but this became a lesson for future generations: The guarantees of personal freedom in the Constitution are only as valuable and reliable as is the fidelity to the Constitution of those to whom we have entrusted it for safekeeping.

We have entrusted the Constitution to all three branches of the federal government for safekeeping. But typically, they fail to do so. Presidents have repeatedly assaulted the freedom of speech many times throughout our history, and Congresses have looked the other way. Abraham Lincoln arrested Northerners who challenged the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson arrested Americans who challenged World War I. FDR arrested Americans he thought might not support World War II. LBJ and Richard Nixon used the FBI to harass hundreds whose anti-Vietnam protests frustrated them.

In the post-9/11 era the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act.

In our own post 9/11 era, the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act. It was born in secrecy, as members of the House of Representatives were given 15 minutes to read its 300 pages before voting on it in October 2001, and it operates in silence, as those who suffer under it cannot speak about it.

The Patriot Act permits FBI agents to write their own search warrants and gives those warrants the patriotic and harmless-sounding name of national security letters (NSLs). This authorization is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that the people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that that security can only be violated by a search warrant issued by a neutral judge and based upon probable cause of crime.

The probable cause requirement compels the feds to acquire evidence of criminal behavior about the person whose records they seek, so as to prevent politically motivated invasions of privacy and fishing expeditions like those that were common in the colonial era. Judges are free, of course, to sign the requested warrant, to modify it and sign it, or to reject it if it lacks the underlying probable cause.

The very concept of a search warrant authorized by law enforcement and not by the courts is directly and profoundly antithetical to the Constitution -- no matter what the warrant is called. Yet, that’s what Congress and President Bush made lawful when they gave us the Patriot Act.

When FBI agents serve the warrants they’ve written for themselves -- the NSLs as they call them -- they tell the recipient of the warrant that he or she will commit a felony if he or she tells anyone -- a lawyer, a judge, a spouse, a priest in confessional -- of the receipt of the warrant. The NSLs are typically not served on the person whose records the FBI wants; rather, they are served on the custodians of those records, such as computer servers, the Post Office, hospitals, banks, delivery services, telephone providers, etc.

Because of the Patriot Act’s mandated silence, the person whose records the FBI seeks often never knows his or her records have been seized. Since October 2001, FBI agents and other federal agents have served more than 350,000 search warrants with which they have authorized themselves to conduct a search. Each time they have done so, they have warned the recipient of the warrant to remain silent or be prosecuted for telling the truth about the government.

Occasionally, recipients have not remained silent. They have understood their natural and constitutionally protected right to the freedom of speech and their moral and fiduciary duty to their customer or client, and they have moved in federal court either to suppress the warrant or for the right to tell the customer or client whose records are being sought that the FBI has come calling. Isn’t that odd in America -- asking a judge for permission to tell the truth about the government?

What’s even more odd is that the same section of the Patriot Act that criminalizes speaking freely about the receipt of an agent-written search warrant also authorizes the FBI to give the recipient of the warrant permission to speak about it. How un-American is that -- asking the FBI for permission to tell the truth about the government?

Last week in San Francisco, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston held that the section of the Patriot Act that prohibits telling anyone about the receipt of an FBI agent-written search warrant and the section that requires asking and receiving the permission of the FBI before talking about the receipt of one profoundly and directly infringe upon the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. And the government knows that.

We all know that the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to encourage open, wide, robust debate about and transparency from the government. Our right to exercise the freedom of speech comes from our humanity, not from the government. The Constitution recognizes that we can only lose that right by consent or after a jury trial that results in conviction and incarceration.

But we can also lose it by the tyranny of the majority, as Congress and the president in 1798 and 2001 have demonstrated.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. His latest is “Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.”

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

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'The Bachelor' producers try to silence show spoilers ahead of finale

Steve Carbone, also known as Reality Steve, has been a staple for ABC’s “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” spoilers since he received an explosive tip in 2009—despite proposing to Melissa Rycroft, Jason Mesnick was going to dump her for Molly Malaney on a shocking “After the Final Rose.”

And he was right. 

Since then, Carbone has been successfully dropping “Bachelor” bombs left and right on RealitySteve.com, with the exception of a couple wrong facts throughout the years (Ali Fedotowsky or Brad Womack’s seasons, anyone?)

Producers have not been too pleased with Carbone’s antics.

NZK Productions, a division of Warner Bros., which produces “The Bachelor,” sued the blogger back in 2011, claiming that he was trying to persuade contestants to breach their confidentiality agreements by giving him information.  The lawsuit was settled, but Carbone was sued again in January for allegedly violating his settlement agreement and is currently involved in the litigation.

Carbone’s attorney, Richard Davis, told FOX 411 that the first lawsuit producers filed was settled by Carbone agreeing not to contact “The Bachelor” cast, crew or employees, and agreeing not to pay any third parties for non-public information regarding the shows.  

“This second suit was filed without the producers coming to Steve with any evidence of a violation of the settlement agreement,” Davis said, adding it is “entirely based on speculation.”

Carbone has filed motions to have the claims dismissed.   

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Carbone told FOX 411. “The allegations against me contain no facts.  They’ve never offered a single bit of evidence to support their claims.”

Carbone added that he “doesn’t have to worry” because he didn’t violate the settlement agreement and that the lawsuit is “frivolous.”

“I have plenty of other ways [to get spoilers,]” he said.  “I don’t need to contact contestants for them.  I know I’m not doing anything wrong.”

Carbone does, however, (somewhat) understand where the producers are coming from in their anger.

“I think that they’re bothered, they put a lot of hard work into the show,” he said. “But nobody can blame me for what I do. I’m providing a service that plenty of people want. I’d be stupid to not post what I know.”

One of the things Carbone knows is who Bachelor Sean Lowe will pick in tonight’s finale, and he thinks his spoiler—which was released on his blog in November before the first preview of the season even aired—affected the way producers edited the show.

(Spoiler alert)

Carbone has a hunch that producers may have shown very few clips of his predicted winner Catherine Giudici’s interactions with Sean throughout the season to potentially throw off fans who may have read his spoilers.  

“Obviously there’s no way for me to prove it,” he said, but adds that none of the editing in past seasons has been as “blatant as it has been with Catherine.”

In a March 7 blog post, Carbone said he was counting down the days until he was “vindicated” from his spoiler and that in the beginning of the season there may have been some doubt “because of how little camera time Catherine got.”

“But all in all, people have come to accept that pretty much 95% of the spoilers that I post on this site are going to end up right,” he wrote.  

Okay, so he could be right, but he could be right and liable.    

Davis is confident in a victory for Carbone, however.  

“We believe the claims lack merit and that Steve will be vindicated once he gets his days in court,” Davis said.  “In that event, I suspect the producers will think long and hard before asserting another meritless claim in violation of the parties’ prior settlement.”

“At some point the producers will recognize that Steve is a journalist whose network of sources is so broad that he does not need to approached those persons restricted by the settlement agreement in order to obtain his information, but it may take a judge or a jury to bring that lesson home.”  

In the meantime, Carbone said he is “riding the wave” of the success of his now-full time job, which began 10 years ago as just a hobby.

“I enjoy writing and making people laugh,” he said.  

Warner Bros., which produces “The Bachelor,” declined to comment on the lawsuit.  

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