This is why so many newspapers are called "The Mirror"

Kevin Willaimson has a remarkable essay about the Gosnell abortion-murders, and the press cover-up.

No Job Too Small 

A blind spot in the media's all-seeing eye.

Excerpt:

... There is no context in which the grisly serial murders of a still-uncalculated number of newborns is not news. The horrific case of Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia has been the subject of something very closely resembling an intentional media blackout by a great deal of the major media. When Washington Post writer Sarah Kliff was pressed on her refusal to acknowledge the story, she sniffed that she covers “policy, not local crime.” To which National Review’s Robert VerBruggen replied: “Similarly, national gun-policy people do not cover local crime in places like Aurora or Newtown.” Strange that we all know about such local-yokel crime stories as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which the relatively modest number of seven mobsters lost their lives. 

Our country is trying very hard not to think about abortion — about the physical reality of abortion. Earlier this year, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld a ban on the use of what critics insist on calling “graphic images” — but what is in fact simple photography — in abortion protests. Similar attempts to suppress free speech on the subject of abortion crop up regularly. Abortion is a strange issue in that it is the allegedly secular and materialist side of the debate that finds itself taking refuge in metaphysics, in this case the fiction of “personhood” that suddenly descends upon a human being at some point. The other side, thought to be populated mostly by religious cranks, is content to address the physical reality of abortion, the facts that cannot be denied but may be ignored. 

The Gosnell case is shocking, but only because it makes visible and explicit what had been hidden and implicit. Every abortion is a shocking act of grisly violence — against the baby, who is murdered, and against the mother, whose body is converted into a crime scene. Taking some account of the moral reckoning of what our country has been up to for the past 40 years is a task of great scope and complexity. It is a job that is too big for the mass media. But willfully ignoring the story is a job that is not too big for them, even though doing so reveals our mighty newspapers and television networks to be smaller than we had thought. If this is what American newspapers have to offer, then they do not deserve to survive, and they will not. But the culpability is not theirs alone: There is a reason that there are many newspapers called The Mirror.

The Gosnell cover-up, and the horrendous crimes and legal acts against children that the media covers up, isn't merely an indictment of the mainstream media. We watch and read what these people spew. The American public keeps these frauds employed. We provide their advertising revenue. These hacks and anchors and executives make tens and tens of millions of dollars, their fraudulent "journalistic" corporations make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, happily paid by us. 

A substantial portion of the American public doesn't want to know about abortions and infanticide, or countless other crimes like Constitutional outrages against freedom of speech and religion and against the right to keep and bear arms and against the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, or massive debts that will impoverish our children and that will never be repaid, or gross foreign policy incompetence that borders on treason, committed by our secular elites. 

Most Americans are not "victims" of our dishonest journalists. They are complicit. As Williamson wryly notes, that's why so many of our newspapers are called "The Mirror".