The Rev. Alveda King

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When reporting about black churches and abortion, why not seek sources on both sides?

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When reporting about black churches and abortion, why not seek sources on both sides?

You’d think an asteroid was hurtling toward Earth judging from the outraged coverage on abortion the past three weeks after Politico announced on May 3 that the Supreme Court may be poised to reverse Roe v. Wade.

If the coverage was measured, even-handed and inclusive, I could deal with it. In that case, we would be talking about a standard journalistic response to a major story.

But no, what we are seeing — in commentaries and even in news reports — is a mash of “The Handmaid’s Tale, “ the imminent end of civilization as we know it and White supremacy because — as we all know — male White nationalists are behind all this.

So, when I saw this Washington Post piece on how black Protestants view abortion (curiously, Catholics were totally left out of the piece), I figured I’d get a fresh look at the issue and some crucial information. Black women are 13% of the female population but 30% of those who abort their young. Yes, this is an important issue in Black churches and communities.

One would think. And the headline said black churches were “conflicted” over the possibility of abortion access being curtailed, so I read further, hoping the article would air the views of Black church leaders and believers on both sides of the issue.

I can’t say they did.

When a draft Supreme Court opinion leaked indicating that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, the Rev. Cheryl Sanders felt conflicted.

The senior pastor of D.C.’s Third Street Church of God personally doesn’t support abortion but is weary of the politics around being labeled “pro-life” and is grappling with how to address the issue before her predominantly Black congregation. “If you understand that in the politicized term, it’s fraught with problematic racial views and exceptions and blind spots,” she says. And Sanders doesn’t want to align herself with far-right conservative activists she disagrees with on many social issues.


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New podcast: New York Times lets Planned Parenthood spin bad news about Margaret Sanger?

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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.


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Really? Sun says amazingly faith-free ministers visit the haunted streets in Baltimore

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Oh ye Baltimore Sun editors, what will I do without your tree-pulp product landing in my front yard every morning?

This morning I picked up the paper and, as I chomped on my bagel, I read a cutline under the A1 featured photograph that showed the Rev. Alveda King, with the Rev. C.L. Bryant of Louisiana looking on, singing as she met with some people gathered near the Billie Holiday Memorial statue here in Baltimore. The photo appeared with a story that ran with this headline: "After unrest, GOP looks to make inroads in Baltimore."

I, of course, wanted to know what the niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was singing. There is a chance that it was, "God Bless the Child," but I would think the odds are higher that she was singing some kind of hymn. Ministers have been known to do things like that, from time to time. However, the content of her song was apparently not worthy of inclusion in the cutline or the story.

Come to think of it, I would also liked to have known something about what Alveda King and Bryant had to say while they were in town. But, alas, almost everything that they said was not relevant to this news story, or, at least, the religious content of their visit was not relevant.

Why? You see, this visit was a political visit -- period. I do not deny that politics was involved, of course, because the story goes out of its way to stress the GOP ties of these two ministers and the political nature of their visit. However, might the significance of their visit have been linked to their ability to speak to African-Americans in pulpits and pews? Might the religious content of their visit have been newsworthy, even as political content?

Apparently not. Here is the top of the story:


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