How ideology tries to influence reporting on abortion
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Opinion
Last November, the French media regulator, Arcom, fined the TV channel CNews for breaching the journalistic obligation of honesty. But what at first sounds like a safeguard for truthful reporting turns out to be quite the opposite.
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The fine came after Aymeric Pourbaix, a journalist on a programme broadcast by CNews, presented an infographic on the causes of death, focusing on the global number of abortions.
The data came from the World meter, which is based on the latest estimates published by various sources, including the World Health Organisation (WHO). According to the WHO, there are around 73 million induced abortions worldwide each year. In light of this data, the journalist described abortion as “the world’s leading cause of death”.
For people like Irene Khan, ‘disinformation’ seems to be anything that does not fit their particular narrative.
This statement sparked a wave of outrage. The channel was accused of being dangerous and broadcasting biased information. Despite the fact that CNews published an apology on X to “anyone who may have been hurt by it”, the French media regulator Arcom did not hesitate to go after the organisation.
After months of proceedings, it fined the channel 100,000 euros for failing to comply with its “duty of honesty and rigour in the presentation and processing of information”.
Disinformation
This case is not an isolated incident. If a journalistic “duty of honesty” can be reinterpreted to mean that you are not allowed to speak publicly about the link between abortion and the ending of a human life, then it should not come as a surprise that the notions of “true” and “false” are equally up for debate.
One of the most striking examples of redefining ‘true’ and ‘false’ is a report by the current UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Irene Khan. As her job title suggests, this woman is supposed to defend freedom of expression. In this report, however, she has successfully turned her mandate upside down, calling for censorship of what she calls ‘gendered disinformation’.
According to her, “gendered disinformation” is a “strategy to silence women and gender-diverse voices”. She argues that this disinformation must be banned because it “violates women’s right to health by spreading false and misleading information about sexual and reproductive health and rights”. “For example, in Ireland”, Khan continues, “around the time of the abortion referendum, false information was spread linking abortion to depression.”
For people like Irene Khan, ‘disinformation’ seems to be anything that does not fit their particular narrative. All scientific studies in the world on post-abortion depression will not change the fact that they will see this reality as ‘disinformation’ and, therefore, as something that must be suppressed.
Zuckerberg’s confession
The lack of a definition of ‘disinformation’ (or ‘misinformation’) gives institutions and online platforms immense power to decide what can and can not be said.
Meta-boss Mark Zuckerberg’s stunning public confession earlier this year removed any doubt about the extent of online censorship in the fight against ‘disinformation’. In a video message, Zuckerberg admitted that Meta removed millions of pieces of content daily and that many of Meta’s third-party “fact-checkers” were politically biased, resulting in the censoring of harmless content.
To make up for these mistakes, he promised that Meta would remove “restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate” – a move that one Guardian commentator lamented as “a new era of lies”.
Because ideologies are systems of ideas that contradict reality, they must be enforced by force.
In playing the part, the EU has not hesitated to respond by stepping up its commitment to fighting ‘disinformation’. With the EU Digital Service Act becoming binding law for all EU member states in 2024, this commitment is not just empty words, but a real threat to online platforms, which will now be obliged under the Act to remove all ‘illegal content’, ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ or face massive fines - again leaving it to those in power to define these terms.
Live not by lies
Attempts to redefine words to comply with the dominant narrative and to censor those who don’t go along are nothing new. In fact, it is one of the most prevalent characteristics of any ideology. Because ideologies are systems of ideas that contradict reality, they must be enforced by force. One means of enforcement is the censorship of dissenting voices.
Our age is marked by deconstructivism and subjectivism, where factual truth and even biological realities are denied and branded as “disinformation”, and those who stand by them are silenced in sometimes quite brutal ways. Therefore, it is an urgent task for Christians to find ways to respond.
In his book Live not by Lies, Rod Dreher attempts such an answer. From a series of powerful testimonies from the resistance movement against communism, he draws a simple but significant conclusion. The most powerful resistance to totalitarian ideologies is the refusal to tell and repeat lies.
Which brings us back to CNews: While the channel saw itself forced by immense public pressure to apologise for calling abortion a cause of death, others have taken up the challenge to denounce the totalitarian nature of the fines imposed on CNews.
The French magistrate and writer Jean-Marie Le Méné, for example, analysed the situation in the weekly Valeurs Actuelles:
Arcom [the French media regulatory authority] writes: “Abortion cannot be presented as a cause of death.” So that abortion can be carried out with a clear conscience, it is forbidden to say that abortion takes away life. Otherwise, the keystone of the system collapses. But who believes this fiction?
It may come at a high price, but the refusal to live by lies, to repeat what we know to be false or harmful to the human person, has immense power because it exposes the bias and will eventually cause the whole system to crumble.
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