How Conservative Tweeters Blew Up The 'House Of Horrors' Story Of Kermit Gosnell's Abortion Clinic
The stories were driven by a flood of tweets from conservatives Thursday night, which helped garner real momentum for the trial for the first time and bring it to full mainstream attention.
The story of Gosnell is horrific: He allegedly murdered live babies in an unsanitary, late-term abortion clinic for nearly three decades before being arrested in 2011. He is charged with eight counts of murder, including seven babies and one woman, Karnamaya Mongar, who died after a botched abortion.
Despite that, there was very little mainstream attention paid to the trial.
It gained little coverage on cable news, and no national papers picked it up as a front-page story — even at the Philadelphia Inquirer, it only made for below-the-fold news.
The Twitter frenzy began Thursday when Mollie Hemingway, a writer at Patheos.com, asked Washington Post health policy reporter Sarah Kliff why she hadn't been covering the Gosnell trial. She was one of many conservatives up in arms about a column from Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers, who criticized the mainstream press for paying little attention to the trial.
That didn't sit well with other conservatives like Bethany Mandel, a writer for Commentary Magazine, who called Kliff's response "shocking" on Friday. Hemingway's spark ignited Mandel other conservatives to start joining in.
By the end of Thursday, "#Gosnell" was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter. BuzzFeed's Jessica Testa tweeted out this chart showing how drastically mentions of "Gosnell" had increased over the past day:
"It's been amazing to watch," Mandel said. "You really see the power of Twitter."
The momentum has carried through to Friday.
Mandel said that she hadn't heard of the story until Tuesday, but she doesn't think that's completely a result of liberal reporter biases, as some have suggested.
"We're kind of conditioned to tune out the abortion conversation, because it never goes anywhere," Mandel said. "This is not that conversation. This is not a story about abortion. This is a story about mass murder."
Still, Mandel can scarcely remember the last time such a spontaneous outcry earned the legitimate attention of reporters so rapidly. Hemingway didn't stop tweeting about Gosnell until nearly 2 a.m. Friday morning. And by the morning, the mainstream press began to take notice.
The closest comparison Mandel could think of was the 2011 takedown of then-New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, which was precipitated by a relentless push from conservative media titan Andrew Breitbart.
"Andrew singlehandedly brought down Anthony Weiner," Mandel said. "His constant beating-the-drum, saying 'you need to talk about this,' eventually brought down a sitting Congressman. I would say, off the top of my head, that's what this movement reminds me of."