Gov. Jerry Brown

Gov. Jerry Brown's Catholicity vs. euthanasia decision gets above-the-fold ink

Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old Californian who moved to Oregon last year so she could end her life instead of facing the last stages of brain cancer, got her political revenge this week.

That's the reality in the news coverage. That’s because -- unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere -- California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill making assisted suicide legal. Which opened the gates to this controversial personal or family choice to some 38 million people overnight.

And the Los Angeles Times reporter who covered it did a great job of making the religion angle front and center. That is, the Catholic governor of the country’s most populous state did something totally against his religion, but readers got to learn about how that decision played out. Start reading here:

Caught between conflicting moral arguments, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, signed a measure Monday allowing physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their deaths.
Brown appeared to struggle in deciding whether to approve the bill, whose opponents included the Catholic Church.
“In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” Brown wrote in a signing message. “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others.”

After explaining some provisions of the End of Life Option Act and placing a quote by its opponents quite high in the story, the reporter swung back to Brown, who said he had weighed the religious arguments.


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Pro-abortion bias in news story on Catholic universities? Well, duh

"Biased much?" asked a reader who passed along a link to a San Francisco Chronicle story on two Catholic universities limiting employees' abortion coverage.

You mean the fact that the news report is slanted — from the very top — toward the abortion-rights point of view and leans heavily in that side's favor in the amount of ink given to direct quotes?

OK, maybe you have a point, dear reader.

Pro-abortion bias seeping into mainstream media reports is not exactly breaking news, of course. But the Chronicle makes a noble effort at perfecting the craft.

The lede sets the stage:

California has some of the nation's strongest protections for abortion rights. But the recent decisions by two Catholic universities, Santa Clara and Loyola Marymount, to eliminate most abortion insurance coverage for their employees were cleared in advance by state agencies.
Now Gov. Jerry Brown's administration is taking another look.
The state Department of Managed Health Care is conducting "an in-depth analysis of the issues surrounding coverage for abortion services under California law," said Marta Green, the department's chief deputy director.
What the department is reconsidering, as first reported by California Lawyer magazine, is whether the universities are violating a 1975 state law that requires managed health plans to cover all "medically necessary" procedures.

 


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