ProPublica is perhaps the nation’s leading purveyor of Potemkin journalism, which entails dressing up political propaganda with neutral-sounding journalistic verbiage to create the impression that you’ve done genuine reporting.
This week, ProPublica, naturally, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in “public service” for “exposing the fatal consequences of abortion bans.”
Now, the first hitch here is that ProPublica proved nothing of the sort. Its abortion stories are perhaps the sloppiest and sleaziest of its catalog, even worse than the string of pitiful smears against Supreme Court justices. In a healthy environment, journalism schools would use them as prime examples of hackery and conjecture.
Even a cursory reading of ProPublica articles on abortion finds that the central contention is false. Take its piece on Amber Thurman.
In August 2022, the 28-year-old North Carolina woman checked herself into a suburban Atlanta hospital emergency room, complaining of severe pain. She was suffering from an infection caused by the remains of twin fetuses she had aborted by pill five days earlier.
The first thing you’ll notice when reading ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters is that they fail to offer a single on-the-record source who maintains that abortion laws slowed or stopped doctors from providing medical help for Thurman. Not one.
Indeed, a reader must plow through to the 57th paragraph of the article to find this throwaway line: “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C.”
Not clear? Now, that’s a remarkable concession to make deep into a story. The headline, after all, promises to prove that “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care.”
Have, not may have.
Anyway, by “not clear,” the reporters mean no testimony exists to support the implication that a dilation and curettage procedure, in which the lining of the uterus is scraped to remove tissue, was delayed because doctors were nervous about Georgia’s abortion law.
Whenever the story hits a juncture at which any real reporter would feel compelled to offer corroboration, ProPublica switches to interviewing nameless “OB-GYNs in states that outlawed abortion” or pro-abortion activists who offer politically motivated guesswork. Indeed, the bulk of the piece is a rehashing of political talking points and scaremongering that do nothing but distract from the lack of evidence.
We call that a “column” in the business.
It’s more than likely no medical professional involved in the Thurman case would go on the record because Georgia’s law unambiguously states that a “medical emergency” not only means saving a patient’s life under any circumstance but also allows for an abortion if it is “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”
To confuse readers, ProPublica regularly conflates D&Cs and miscarriages with elective abortions. That’s bad journalism. But here’s the thing: The fetuses had already been destroyed. There was absolutely no legal basis for any doctor, not even one confused about the supposed ambiguities of abortion laws, to fail to give Thurman all the care she needed. That seems like a vital fact that should have been mentioned somewhere in a 3,400-word investigative piece.
The only inarguable truth in the Thurman case is that she died from complications caused by abortion pills. That’s the headline. That’s the buried lede. Knowing this, ProPublica feels compelled to assure readers that there are only “rare complications” from abortion pills — “extremely rare” even.
There is now mounting evidence that mifepristone is less safe than the Food and Drug Administration has led women to believe. When two pro-life researchers at the Ethics and Public Policy Center reviewed health insurance claims from over 800,000 chemical abortions, they found that complications occurred in about 1 in 10 cases.
Maybe they should have won the Pulitzer Prize.
It’s likely that the Thurman story had first been shopped around to bigger, more prestigious venues that passed for obvious reasons. That’s how it usually works. You start by pitching to the New York Times and work your way down until you end up with ProPublica. But just because bigger venues won’t publish some of these rickety hit pieces, it doesn’t mean they won’t spread their claims. Columnists at the New York Times and other venues made sure to do it.
Mostly, though, ProPublica, funded by a deep-pocketed progressive group, exists to create fake stories for politicians to use as oppo material. You may remember when many political experts assured us that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and resulting state-level abortion limitations would forever sink the entire GOP? Well, less than a week after the Thurman story hit, Axios reported that Senate Democrats would launch a “blitz on emergency abortion care this week after ProPublica reporting on death of Georgia woman.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned Thurman on many occasions. Now, obviously, we should take the biases of pro-lifers and pro-abortion activists into account when reading their stories. But ideological bias doesn’t prevent a journalist from making arguments that rely on facts. It is implausible that any genuine journalist could possibly believe ProPublica’s Thurman story was well-reported or honest. And the fact that Pulitzers reward this kind of transparent hackery only further destroys its already battered credibility.