But it was the anecdotal beginning

Always be sure to fact-check the rapes. Bitches lie, you know, especially when they’re ten years old. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler was on the case:

This is the account of a one-source story that quickly went viral around the world — and into the talking points of the president.

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a right to abortion, has led a number of states to quickly impose new laws to restrict or limit abortions. Ohio was one of the first, imposing a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape and incest.

On July 1, the Indianapolis Star, also known as the IndyStar, published an article, written by the newspaper’s medical writer, about how women seeking abortions had begun traveling from Ohio to Indiana, where less restrictive abortion laws were still in place. “Patients head to Indiana for abortion services as other states restrict care,” the article was headlined.

That was a benign headline. But it was the anecdotal beginning that caught the attention of other news organizations. The article said that three days after the June 24 court ruling, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, Caitlan Bernard, who performs abortions, received a call from “a child abuse doctor” in Ohio who had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio, “the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care,” the Star reported.

We get several more paragraphs on the lack of corroboration for this story, and at the end he sums up:

This is a very difficult story to check. Bernard is on the record, but obtaining documents or other confirmation is all but impossible without details that would identify the locality where the rape occurred.

With news reports around the globe and now a presidential imprimatur, however, the story has acquired the status of a “fact” no matter its provenance. If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding.

Below that there’s an update saying the story has been confirmed.

Fact checking is obviously a good and necessary thing, but it’s not equally obvious why Kessler saw fit to single out this one for an actual story.

Yes, journalism is, among other things, an accumulation of facts, but it’s a lot of other things too. It’s a choice of what to cover, for instance, and a choice of how to cover it, and sometimes even a questioning of reasons for covering it.

H/t Screechy Monkey

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