SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: News outlets protecting Patty Murray by not reporting Senate story

Feb 6, 2019, 2:15 PM

Patty Murray...

Sen. Patty Murray, pictured here in 2017. (AP)

(AP)

You and I have to have a heart-to-heart.

We don’t do this often enough.

As it turns out, I’m out of touch in my worldview with people who live in the City of Seattle. But I’ve always said that I will never alter my opinion because of what people want to hear. Through not altering our worldview, we’ve enjoyed incredible success on our show. And whether you’re one of the people who disagrees with me and tells me how horrible I am, whether you’re indifferent — you like some of the stuff, disagree with some — or whether you’re a daily listener who agrees with everything I say, thank you.

Why am I bringing all of this up?

RELATED: Patty Murray lone senator to block ban on killing babies after birth

For reasons I’ve tried to clearly articulate, the issue nationwide that has been the hottest topic for the last week or so has been the trend of late-term abortion. I’m not going to talk in-depth about that. I care passionately about that issue, and not because I think pro-choice people are horrible. As I’ve said many times, whether you believe life begins at conception or at fetal viability, I respect your viewpoint.

But I don’t think that anyone can reasonably argue that two minutes before birth, that’s not a person. I don’t think that coming through the birth canal is when life begins. I really don’t understand how that has become such a hot-button issue.

On Tuesday’s show, I explained how Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) introduced the Born Alive Survivors Protection Act. He said that this isn’t about fetal viability or even about life a few minutes before birth — this is about killing babies who have been born. His bill called for doctors to keep alive babies that are born alive after a failed minutes-before-birth abortion. He thought that, in America, everyone could come together and agree that killing live babies is wrong, and so he wanted a unanimous consent decree from the Senate.

This bill was spiked by a Washington politician, Sen. Patty Murray.

To me, there was no bigger news than that on Tuesday. It’s one of the most talked-about issues in the country for the last couple of weeks, and a Washington state senator became the focal point of that story in the Senate. Nobody in local media thought that was even worthy of a mention. Why is that?

Isn’t this a news story? It’s an issue that people are extremely passionate about, and believe me, I respect the passion on both sides of the issue. Here we are in Seattle, Washington, and the “mom in tennis shoes,” our longtime senator, blocked this on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

I’m not asking anyone to take sides. But isn’t this at least worthy of a mention in local news? If I hadn’t talked about this on my radio show, no one in the Pacific Northwest would have known about it, unless they saw it on a national site. They wouldn’t have heard it on local radio and they definitely didn’t see it on local TV news.

We have news outlets that chose to bury this because it doesn’t reflect particularly well on Patty Murray. “If we don’t report it, it didn’t happen, and nobody will say anything bad about Patty Murray.” With their actions, they are essentially saying that one of their primary objectives is to provide cover to politicians whom they like, even if they have to spike a story. How many other stories are kept hidden from you because they don’t fit the ideology of other outlets? Allegedly, stories of Ed Murray were spiked for years.

There are over 500 comments on this story on our Facebook page, and over 160 comments on the MyNorthwest article. This is a subject people care about. And so I want to say thank you for sticking with me and allowing me to tell you about the subjects on which other news outlets will not report.

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Dori: News outlets protecting Patty Murray by not reporting Senate story