Soon after the founding of Amazon.com in 1995, I began offering the following research tip to my journalism students.
When reporting about a person or a topic, especially when the subject is controversial, go to Amazon.com and type in two or perhaps three search terms — including a proper name or the keyword linked to the topic you are researching.
Of course, reporters should do broader searches online and in professional-level periodical collections — looking for experts and activists on both sides of the story being covered. What an Amazon.com search gives you is a look at who has been doing, well, book-length studies of a person or a topic.
So let’s take a look at an Amazon.com search linked to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). Let’s search for “Margaret Sanger” and “eugenics.” We are looking for sources that could have been used in the New York Times piece that ran the other day with this sobering double-decker headline:
Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics
Ms. Sanger, a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, supported a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding
That’s a very controversial topic and this Times piece, we shall see, includes some rather blunt information about this “icon” of the cultural left.
What the story does not contain, however, is a single quote from a scholar or activist who has done years of research to gather information critical of Sanger and her legacy in American life and culture.
Right at the top of that Amazon.com search are books by two experts who, to my eyes, look solid.
One book is entitled “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.” The author is not a scribe at a right-wing think tank. Instead, Edwin Black — on his Amazon.com biography page — is described as:
Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 200 bestselling editions in 20 languages in more than 190 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel. With more than 1.6 million books in print, his work focuses on human rights, genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropy abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation. He can be found at www.edwinblack.com.
Oh, his editors submitted his work 16 times for consideration by Pulitzer Prize judges. Maybe this is a source worthy of Times consideration? I imagine that he would return a call from a Times reporter.
Then there is this book: “Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility.” It was written by Catholic theologian Angela Franks, who teaches at St. John's Seminary in Boston. Times editors might be concerned that this veteran academic also has six children. She also has an entire page of her website dedicated to her research on Sanger.
So here is a highly qualified voice on the Catholic side of this subject — if editors on the Times team are interested in scholars on the other side of the Sanger-eugenics debates, which have raged for decades.
So what sources did the Times use? For the most part, the nation’s most influential newsroom allowed Planned Parenthood leaders to explain why they were now troubled by elements of Sanger’s work, even as they embrace her legacy — in general. Here’s the overture on the story:
Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” the group said. …
Ms. Sanger, a public health nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn in 1916, has long been lauded as a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer.
But her legacy also includes supporting eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color.
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board, said in a statement.
In other words, this Sanger reevaluation is taking place, in large part, because of this #BlackLivesMatter moment in American life. Lots of American leaders from the past are being knocked down, a notch or two, and that includes Sanger.
Thus, I would think that it would be crucial to talk to African-American pro-life leaders who have been — to say the least — highly critical of Sanger and Planned Parenthood.
How about the Rev. Alveda King, daughter of the late slain civil rights activist Rev. A. D. King and the niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Then again, it would be interesting to talk to African-American pro-lifers who are also Democrats — someone like Louisiana state Sen. Katrina Jackson, who was the key figure behind the abortion legislation that was recently stuck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. (See this recent post: “Conservative news? White GOP justice strikes down bill by black, female pro-life Democrat.”
Then again, Times people also could have visited the website of Democrats For Life, which still has material online from its recent webinar on #BlackLivesMatter issues. There are several African-American speakers listed there who might be interesting sources for a story on Sanger and eugenics.
Why talk to Democrats? Well, the article’s only reference to critics of Sanger is a reference to “anti-abortion conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Ben Carson, the federal housing secretary.”
You see, criticism of Sanger and Planned Parenthoods is, well, just politics.
Oh, wait! The Times piece does include one point of view critical of New York Planned Parenthood and its decision about Sanger.
Ms. Sanger still has defenders who say the decision to repudiate her lacks historical nuance.
Ellen Chesler, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank, and the author of a biography of Ms. Sanger and the birth control movement, said that while the country is undergoing vast social change and reconsidering prominent figures from the past, Ms. Sanger’s views have been misinterpreted.
The eugenics movement had wide support at the time in both conservative and liberal circles, Ms. Chesler said, and Ms. Sanger was squarely in the latter camp. She rejected some eugenicists’ belief that white middle-class families should have more children than others, Ms. Chesler said.
You get the idea. This is another one of those heated debates in which only one side is worthy of coverage (hello Bill Keller, again).
If Planned Parenthood is going to edit its doctrines linked to Sanger, then the Times team is going to find a way to cooperate in that process. So there.
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