Commentary: The women’s march organizers blew it, and even the media realize it
A short and seemingly insignificant segment on CNN this morning illustrates just how badly the organizers of the so-called Women’s March on Washington blew their chance to turn their event into a national, bipartisan movement against Trump.
In the segment, CNN reporter Brianna Keilar reported live from the scene of Friday’ March for Life — itself a noteworthy event given the normal media blackout that surrounds the March for Life — and explicitly compared the pro-life event to the Women’s March.
Two things are significant about this relatively short segment. First, this is an unusually serious treatment of the March for Life from a legacy media outlet that typically either ignores the marchers or dismisses their plight as hopeless. As Keilar noted, the stakes are real in this case: If Trump follows through on his campaign promise, there is a very real chance that the next four years will see the seating of a Supreme Court justice who might well tip the balance of the court in terms of overturning Roe v. Wade. There’s a long road to travel between now and then, but the end is at least closer at hand than it ever has been.
Credit where credit is due: President Trump is probably largely responsible for a bump in media coverage for the March for Life this year. In his widely watched interview with ABC’s David Muir on Wednesday, Trump scorched Muir and the rest of the media for their refusal to cover the annual protest in a stunningly effective reposte.
When he talks about life issues, Trump still doesn’t sound like a guy who’s particularly well-versed on the movement’s history or philosophical underpinnings, but in this case, that likely helped him press the advantage. “They say,” he prodded Muir, “the press doesn’t cover them.” He didn’t speak with the righteous anger that long-time pro-lifers are simply unable to contain about the way the March for Life is ignored every year. He spoke with Muir as though it were a matter of intellectual curiosity, as though he were asking Muir to tell him it wasn’t true. “This is what the pro-lifers around me say, David — say it isn’t so?”
Of course, Muir could not, and the exchange was so widely covered that the media cannot help but at least notice the marchers this year. Trump has made media dishonesty such a central focus of his early presidency that when he scores a genuine point against them, they dare not prove him right. And so Brianna Keilar was sent out into the cold in Washington, D.C., to acknowledge that, yes, hundreds of thousands of people will be peacefully marching in protest against abortion this year, as they do every year, ending at the steps of the Supreme Court, where they will pray and hold vigil for the millions of unborn who have died and who will continue to die at the altar of legalized abortion.
Of perhaps more significant interest, however, is the fact that Keilar and CNN were forced to put the March for Life on the same political footing as the Women’s March on Washington. Equally surprising is the fact that the Women’s March on Washington is already being described as a “liberal women’s march” even by an outlet such as CNN. Instead of being a nonpartisan protest by all women against the tyranny of Trump, all the work and effort put into the Women’s March has been relegated, in the space of less than a week, to a partisan liberal protest that was most prominently associated with Planned Parenthood. All of the supposed moral authority of an entire gender has been wiped aside in favor of a frank and honest acknowledgement that the marchers were merely liberals who were super unhappy with how the election turned out.
The organizers of the Women’s March have no one to blame but themselves for this. As we covered extensively here at TheBlaze, pro-life groups who were opposed to Trump were publicly disinvited from partnership with the Women’s March. Get it? Being opposed to Trump was declared to be publicly insufficient, and adherence to all aspects of liberal orthodoxy was made a point of participation even in protest against Trump. Meanwhile, “sex workers” were happily invited to a prominent place on the dais.
The entire sorry episode shows that liberals really have learned nothing from the devastating losses they suffered in the November elections, especially as it pertains to relating to average, everyday Americans. Many average, everyday Americans pulled the lever for Trump for the sole and exclusive reason that they considered him to be a better option than the odious, scandal-ridden Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and continue to have grave misgivings about what his presidency will bring.
The organizers of the Women’s March had an opportunity to speak to the concerns of these Americans and to plant a seed of doubt in their minds about repeating their vote in 2020. However, their own ridiculous demands for ideological purity and their behavior during anti-Trump protests have already served to alienate almost all of these people and drive them further into Trump’s arms.
The Women’s March blew it. And even the legacy media have noticed.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for commenting. Your comments are needed for helping to improve the discussion.