Why don't anti-choice marches get much coverage?

Totally not about tyranny.

Now there’s a question.

It’s not often that I agree with the fetus fetishists, but on the issue of media coverage of their March for Reproductive Enslavement, they might actually have a point.

Going back to a previous post about the March for No Choice, I’m totally unsurprised to find out that my Prediction #6 was a dead-on bullseye — the griping and whining about lack of media coverage started before the last forced pregnancy marcher had packed up his dead fetus porn and called it a day. But googling for news on the event, I think for once (maybe the first time ever) they’re not lying or being paranoid or just babbling and writhing in the ecstatic throes of a persecution high: apart from the Ottawa Citizen, it looks like hardly any trad media covered the Fetus Fete. (I heard the Globe & Mail ran something about it, but was unable to find the article.)

While I’m not unhappy about this cold media shoulder, it seems a little odd. No, 10,000 isn’t massive (I’ve been to hockey games that drew more), and it’s a long way from being a game-changer as far as abortion rights go, but I wonder if the media would be so apathetic if 10,000 of anything else besides fetus fetishists showed up en masse on Parliament Hill.

Or maybe it’s not so odd. This thing is an annual event that’s been going on for over 10 years, and it’s the same thing year in and year out: a few thousand people swarm the capital, twitching and jabbering in a delirious Jesus-driven frenzy about abortion and the sanctity of embryos — it’s been done and done and done again, nothing new to report. Or possibly the media’s realized what many of us have long suspected… that this isn’t a protest as much as an astroturfed fauxtest, with the numbers of the piously brain-damaged and clinically psychotic padded by schoolkids bribed into attending. (Where were all “da yoot” last summer when Dr. Morgentaler’s Order of Canada was being lamely protested?)

Or it could be something else. Interestingly, the fetus fetishists weren’t whining (much) 3 years ago when CTV covered their little shindig. It was 2006, the Harper conservatives had just stumbled into power and anti-choicers wanted their pound of electoral flesh in the form of an overhauled abortion policy — something many, not just the media, wondered if Canada’s (scary) New Government might actually do. Now that we all know this issue is something that even the CPC won’t touch with the proverbial 10-foot pole, the media has lost interest. It seems that an event is only as newsworthy as its potential to actuate change — and that’s bad news for anti-choicers, because the media doesn’t set trends, it reflects them.

To paraphrase McLuhan, the media is the message and the message is: it’s over.