Sarah Posner, like Irin Carmon, argues that the press did cover the Gosnell case:
Is Gosnell’s trial getting the same level of coverage on cable as, say, the Jodi Arias trial? No. But that’s a question about the media’s priorities in general, rather than some sort of ideologically-driven fear that the pro-choice position would be exposed. Proponents of safe, legal abortion do not fear any light shed on this awful episode. To the contrary, they were some of the first to condemn Gosnell when the details of a grand jury report were made public in January 2011 and Gosnell was first charged.
Drum points out that most of the right-wing media wasn’t covering the Gosnell trial until recently:
Why hasn’t the Gosnell trial caught on nationally? Beats me. I’ve often wondered just what it is that causes some local crime stories to become media sensations and others to molder in obscurity. But the interest of the conservative press is pretty obvious, and it has little to do with the grisly nature of the case itself. After all, they’ve been well aware of the Gosnell trial all along, because both Breitbart.com and conservative pro-life sites have been covering it extensively. Despite this, they barely mentioned it themselves. Obviously, even conservative editors didn’t it consider it newsworthy on a national scale. Their outrage only kicked into high gear when they spied an opportunity to pretend that this was a story about the liberal media ignoring a grisly abortion story.
Allahpundit weighs in:
[I]f Gosnell’s actually a case study in why we need more higher-end clinics, not less, why hasn’t the media been using him to that effect since he was indicted? Why a blackout instead? You know why: Because no one who sees that picture of the baby with its neck sliced thinks, “We need to make this easier, and to make the slicing happen a bit earlier in development.” The blackout strategy was smart. It just didn’t work.
Ambers urges readers to think “about the many different ways in which the failure to catch Gosnell’s horrible practices early enough represents significant systemic failures that have little to do with abortion”:
If it were easier and more socially accepted to get safer and earlier abortions in Pennsylvania, the demand for his services wouldn’t be as high. Cutting funds for Planned Parenthood and other providers with reputations for medical excellence means that more people will seek the modern day equivalent of back-alley abortions. Also, if health care inequalities weren’t as pronounced, doctors like Gosnell would be kicked out of the market much earlier, or discovered much earlier.
Ed Krayewski’s view:
The case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, horrific on its own, is not helpful as a stand-in or argument in the wider debate about abortion and reproductive rights (because what he did is already illegal), just as the case of Adam Lanza, horrific on its own, is not helpful as a stand-in or argument in the wider debate about personal safety and gun rights (because what he did is already illegal).
And McArdle admits that she should have paid more attention to the case:
I knew about the Gosnell case, and I wish I had followed it more closely, even though I’d rather not. In fact, those of us who are pro-choice should be especially interested. The whole point of legal abortion is to prevent what happened in Philadelphia: to make it safer and more humane. Somehow that ideal went terribly, horribly awry. We should demand to know why.
The Dish 