The pro-life power of the blog

An excellent and very encouraging article by Hilary White in Thursday's LifeSite news tells of the power of the blog to fight back against the mainstream media, especially in pro-life matters where we have, over the years, simply become numbed into apathy by the relentless anti-life bias.

This year's March for Life in Canada had a record attendance of just under 7000 people. The organisers have meticulously counted numbers during the past few years because of routinely inaccurate media reporting. This year most media reports "estimated" numbers at about 3500. CBC National News said “about 1,500 demonstrators” gathered on the Hill. CTV News affiliate Ottawa's CJOH said "Hundreds of people from across the country marched from Ottawa's St. Patrick's Basilica and then gathered on Parliament Hill." (They got the route wrong too.) Many other major national and local papers just ignored the march all together. Here's a LifeSite photo of the crowd:

I remember as a teenager first being angered at the media coverage after a major pro-Life rally in Hyde Park - they did the same, "estimating" numbers at about a fifth of the genuine total. Until recently, there has been little we could do to counteract this bias...
But with the advent of so-called ‘citizen journalism’ and such popular websites as YouTube, bloggers are pushing news media towards greater accountability. This year, the mostly under-thirty crowd of 7000 was filmed with hand-held cameras and cell phones and the digital videos were posted to the internet, making it impossible even for such diehard pro-abortion mainstream news outlets as the CBC to ignore.
The quotation is from Hilary White's article:
Bloggers Trump Mainstream Media With YouTube Videos of Canadian March for Life.

This follows up a previous article by Gudrun Schultz and Steve Jalsevac
Mainstream Media Ignores, Falsifies Canadian March for Life Attendance

The LifeSite article has a list of videos on YouTube. Here is one:



And here is a powerful speech by a pro-life Canadian MP



One thing that strikes me is the importance of getting a video camera to carry to events that are likely to be misreported. Off to Amazon...

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