PHILADELPHIA — The trial resumed just before 11:30 a.m. Monday in a downtown courtroom, as Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart entered Courtroom 304.
“It’s come to my attention that media coverage of this case has increased,” Minehart told the jurors, who could see for themselves how right he was.
Reporters from the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News had settled in alongside a handful of local and wire service reporters to hear the latest testimony regarding the case of Kermit Gosnell, a 72-year-old abortion provider who faces charges of murdering seven infants whose spines he allegedly snipped with scissors when they were born after induced labor at his West Philadelphia clinic.
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Nearly a month after it began, Gosnell’s trial last week finally was at the center of a national spotlight. Once treated largely as an eccentric, if gruesome, local story about a man accused of unthinkable crimes against babies and recklessness toward the women he treated, the case has taken on new significance in recent days, connecting the hot-button issues of abortion, race, media and even guns in a horror-movie narrative.
Other than a smattering of coverage after Gosnell was indicted in 2011, the trial has garnered little attention until an outcry in recent days, largely from conservative pundits and lawmakers, but also from media watchdogs.
“If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing,” Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), an abortion opponent, said in a floor speech, reading from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily.
“This should be front page news,” Fox News analyst and USA Today contributor Kirsten Powers proclaimed last week.
“This ought to be a big story on the merits,” wrote the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.
“By any standard, this is a newsworthy trial,” wrote Bloomberg columnist and Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg.
Washington Post editor Martin Baron agreed that the story deserved more coverage and said the paper should have reported on it sooner. The public editor of the New York Times said the case “deserves more coverage than it’s had, in The Times and elsewhere.”
