I always enjoy deciphering how stories get distorted by the people that report them.

Take this example I found on GOP Bloggers: The Pro-Choice Movement Is Dead. GOP Blogger Matt Margolis, presumably a card-carrying member of the Republican Womb Patrol, chops up an AP story in the Las Vegas Sun about a new Michigan law and trumpets a victory in the Pro-Subjugation movement.

Apparently, in Michigan, women seeking abortions were previously only given the option to see drawings and diagrams of developing fetuses. This new law will give the women the option to see an ultrasound image of the developing fetus instead.

Here's the strange part: According to the AP article and Margolis, "critics called it a further erosion of women's rights." Like Margolis, I couldn't see how this bill eroded anyone's rights. Margolis went on to use this quote as proof positive that the satanic Pro-Choice activists don't want women to have a choice at all, that they're really just trying to kill fetuses any way they can to slake their unquenchable bloodlust and blah blah blah.

I looked for another explanation.

Looking closer into the Sun article, I found a few things that blogger Margolis conveniently left out: "The bill was amended so it no longer requires pregnant women to see the ultrasound images." (My emphasis.) And Michigan Governer Jennifer Granholm "generally has opposed anti-abortion legislation."

So it would seem that the bill was originally intended to force pregnant women to view ultrasounds of their developing fetuses, a move with clear anti-abortion intent, but it was amended to make the ultrasound optional in order that Gov. Granholm would actually sign the bill. To me, that basically wipes out the nefarious intent of the bill, which sounds to me like it should be a clear victory for the pro-choice crowd.

Which brings me back to that quote, "critics called it a further erosion of women's rights." Why on earth would critics consider an optional ultrasound, where it was originally intended to be a required ultrasound, an erosion of women's rights? That makes no sense whatsoever. Unless... the AP screwed up the story.

Courtesy of Google News, here are some other, more informative, views of the same story:

Law requires women get option to see fetus. (I like that one... "requires women get option"... pretty funny. You are REQUIRED to have a choice, dammit!)

Granholm agrees to abortion regulation. "Regulation," indeed.

Here's the best one: Nothing worth headlines in ultrasound bill

If you look at all the stories in Google News, you'll notice how most of the story titles imply that the law is somehow constraining abortions in Michigan, which is, at best, a wild stretch of the imagination. That makes me wonder who told all these reporters about this story, and how it was told to them, and how many reporters have cognitive reasoning skills. But anyway, my point in all this cynical rambling is that not only can't you trust bloggers for factual news, but you can't really even trust the AP for factual news anymore. One has to look at the same news story from multiple sources in order to get a semblence of the facts.

- Thomas Krehbiel