Biased NY Times article covers racist anti-choice campaign

This weekend, the New York Times had a front page article about the racist Atlanta billboards that Samhita covered a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, the entire article is a detailed explanation of the Right to Life group’s opinion, analysis and tactics. Loretta Ross, National Coordinator of Sistersong, is quoted in response, but her arguments barely make a splash on the piece. This doesn’t seem like fair and balanced reporting to me.

Jodi Jacobson at RH Reality Check has more on what was wrong with the article:

But the Times story failed on several fronts. First, it failed to explore in any real depth the factors underlying reproductive and sexual health problems among African American women. Nowhere does the article cite the actual public health data that would immediately discredit the claims of anti-choice groups using racial wedge issues to raise money and gain power.
Second, it failed to provide context for the widespread support among African-American leaders in Congress and in the public health community for expanding access to services.
And third, the Times gave inordinate amounts of space to truly questionable characters in the anti-choice movement without exploring how these groups themselves are at fault for the problem about which they profess to be so worried. In fact, it failed to ask any questions at all about what the so-called right-to-life groups cited were doing to address the causal factors behind high rates of abortion. Nor did it really question the validity or credibility of these groups in any real way, or ask what they’ve done to address poverty, social isolation, or broader health concerns among African American women. The answer? Nothing.

RH Reality Check has been running a series in response to this campaign for a few weeks now. It includes Shark-fu’s great response to the campaign. I also wrote a piece for the series last week, which Courtney linked to, but I wanted to re-emphasize it.
While this campaign targets African American women specifically, we’ve seen these arguments used to target other women of color. I argue that it is a classic divide and conquer strategy, an attempt to pit women of color against reproductive justice activists. Here is an excerpt from that piece:

Latinas and other women of color don’t need to be protected by paternalistic ideologues motivated by a political agenda that disregards the needs of women of color and their families. So thanks for your concern, anti-choicers, but I think the women of color advocates working within the reproductive justice movement have got it covered. We’re working in those clinics you attack, we’re helping to shape policies and provide services in our communities, services that allow us to decide what our needs are.
We know whom we can trust to make decisions about family creation: women themselves. We don’t need limits on what services we can access. And we don’t need your ideological bullying.
The next time one of your crisis pregnancy centers, one of your dramatic billboards, or one of your bogus pieces of “sex and race selection” legislation actually works to support women through whatever choice they make for their families–we’ll talk.

Update: SPARK Reproductive Justice Now has a campaign to urge CBS Outdoor to bring the billboards down. Click here to take action.