Posted on 09/04/2004 6:01:14 AM PDT by Diago
Reuters Editor Blasts Pro-Life Advocates, President Bush in Hostile Email
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 30, 2004
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Media outlets are supposed to report news, not make it. But an editor for one of the world's most recognized news outlets is at the center of a controversy over abortion after he emailed scathing remarks to a pro-life group in response to a press release.
After sending out a routine press release responding to a judge's decision against the partial-birth abortion ban, the National Right to Life Committee received a scathing email from Todd Eastham, a Reuters editor in Washington.
"What's your plan for parenting and educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world," Eastham asks. "Who will pay for policing our streets and maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents and the system fail them?"
"Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit," Eastham continues. "Give me a frigging break, will you?"
Douglas Johnson, NRLC's legislative director, received the email and said he was shocked to see Eastham's response.
"It is sad, but revealing, to see an editor for a major news service so casually and gratuitously express such blatant hostility to both the Bush Administration and to the right to life of unborn children," Johnson said in response.
"We can only wonder at how such vehement opinions may color Mr. Eastham's reporting or editing on subjects such as abortion and the Bush Administration," Johnson added.
Eastham is defending his actions, despite departing from Reuters policy.
He says he normally doesn't edit stories submitted by reporters on the topic of abortion. In response to a Washington Post query about the email, Eastham claims he read the news release "as a personal political solicitation and was not responding in my capacity as an editor."
"I didn't intend this as a professional communication," Eastham contends.
However Eastham apparently violated Reuters "editorial policy," that says "Reuters journalists do not offer their own opinions or views."
Reuters spokesman Stephen Naru told the Post it's "unfortunate" that an editor "chose to offer his personal opinion."
An email to Eastham from LifeNews.com requesting comment for this story was not returned.
Eastham is a Reuters editor for North American news stories. He has also authored numerous Reuters news stories on subjects such as politics and the Catholic Church.
ACTION: To express your opinon about Mr. Eastham's email, go to http://www.reuters.com/-helpSection.jhtml?p=contactUs
Printed from: http://www.lifenews.com/nat770.html
ping
Yeah, right...only when they're awake.
The solution to the "unwanted" children who are being born is get them adopted into loving homes.
Simultaneously, you strengthen the concept of family and personal responsibility such that couples and single women work hard to prevent unwanted pregnancies... LIKE CONTRACEPTION!!!!
Sorry... women who believe they have a right to abortion, but don't bother with a minimal of the pill and second form of contraception just annoy me to no end.
Mike
The solution to the unwanted children who are being born is that their unmarried mothers should keep their legs together in the first place. No form of birth control is perfect.
read the rest of what i wrote... i advocate two forms of contraceptive for a sexually active woman who does not want to get pregnant. that's two female contraceptives, say the pill and diaphragm... and they should still have the man wear a condom... to prevent disease and pregnancy. That's triple layered protection.
besides - personal responsibility does include abstinence, but even abstinent women should consider the pill if their lifestyle involves parties, alcohol, and frequent contact with with men in loosely structured situations. and in the case of rape, we need to figure out a way to get women to feel comfortable about going to a hospital within 72 hours to receive a rape kit, and report the crime.
Interesting how lefties always think children belong to the STATE.
Subjects on which I'm sure he's equally unbiased.
I wonder what this kook had to say about the Catholic Church?
Does anyone have any links to his stories on the Catholic Church? I'm going to go google but I'd sure like to read a few before I send an email. It always helps to have extra ammo.
I believe the only thing that is going to divert this country from the self-destructive, materialistic, libertine path it is now pursuing--a path that includes indulging in sins like the murder of inconvenient babies--is a great moral re-awakening. England did something like this in the 1840s, when English society looked in disgust at the gin addictions, sexual license, and general depravity of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The result of that awakening was the Victorian era, which focused on and glorified family life. Even if not everyone embraced clean living during the Victorian era (not by a very long shot!), society as a whole reformed itself and elevated its perspective. There was no public tolerance for depraved behavior, as we have today.
It's my hope, my increasing belief, that we are beginning to see the glimmerings of the same sort of reformation in this country today. If that is the case then mere public opprobium will discourage the sort of lifestyle in which a girl would have to use birth control pills because she might get drunk at a party. And though abortions will probably never be eliminated altogether, because people do make mistakes and sin, they may no longer be legal.
Am I unrealistic? For the moment, yes, of course--I admit it. This is something I am praying for 25 years down the road. But it's possible; it has happened to people before, and it can happen again. This forum is exactly the sort of place where the reformation begins.
BUMP!
First thing I found out he came from the NYTs.
STRIKE/// That was wrong.
Tiki,
I was going to google him and Catholic but probably won't get around to it until later.
http://home.att.net/~s.c.ninlil.c.b/Mystical.htmGhost Hunters Raise Ruckus in Baltimore by Todd Eastham
You can read the column, in full, without the author's name at this following link..
021227-- Ghost hunters raise ruckus in old Baltimore
BALTIMORE: Tales of ghosts and spirits are all very well, I told my hosts, but a reporter needs something objective and tangible upon which to peg a story.That's when the fork came flying out of nowhere -- or rather over a low partition separating a group of diners in a corner of a cosy dining room with closed windows and no door.
"Did you see that?" I asked one of my table mates, Towson State University student Michelle Salapka. She nodded her head but couldn't bring the words to her now gaping lips, her eyes wide as saucers, staring at the fork on the table between us.
The dinner, hosted by the Maryland Ghost and Spirit Association at the Baltimore seafood restaurant Bertha's Mussels, was turning into a rousing success. The 800-member group, whose Web site is at http://www.marylandghosts.com, is dedicated to investigating "ghostly paranormal phenomenon" at Civil War and other old sites around Maryland. [snip] "She just caught two orbs!" shouted Litsinger.
Images of weird glowing orbs, floating in the air over the tables inexplicably, were showing up on digital cameras. One photo showed an odd cartoonish hazy grey figure with huge almond eyes standing in the background.
Other participants were dashing up and down the stairs and into back rooms of the restaurant, taking readings with temperature guns -- looking for hot and cold spots. And then there were the strange electromagnetic readings showing up on the EMF (electromagnetic field detectors) that some were wielding. [snip]
I'm still a little sceptical, concerned that this feature is going to read like something in the Halloween edition of a high school newspaper. After all, maybe the fork was sitting on that partition all along and somebody walking past had knocked it off and rushed into the next room. Or something.
Litsinger thrust an EMF detector into my hand and pushed me over to a stained glass window behind a glass partition in a passage in the restaurant. I read "Bertha E. Bartholomew," amid flowers and angels and clouds. It was some sort of memorial.
The reading goes off the dial, at the edge of the red. Must be a fluorescent light or something in there, I said. Then the reading goes back into the green near zero. The light didn't even flicker. [snip]
But there's another angry presence. "Sometimes the cats will come hissing down the hall with their backs up," Norris said.[snip]
"Have you seen them?" I asked a waitress. "No, but she has," she said, pointing to a young woman carrying dishes.
"I'm kind of busy right now," said the second waitress, who identified herself only as Delvina.
I pressed her for more.
"It was sort of cloudy, milky white," she said finally.
HOTBED OF HAUNTINGS
"Ectoplasm," I nodded sagely. Where was my sceptical hat? [snip]
The story surrounding another nearby restaurant, the Zodiac, is better known. It seems the owner of a speak-easy on the site, a surly, hard-drinking man, hanged himself there after his wife ran off with another man.
"I asked the spirit if it would move something for me and there was a pole that just started rotating," said Karen Corkran, a member of the ghost association, of an outing there.
"I felt something extremely powerful up there. I got real tight in my chest and I couldn't breathe."
"Why ghosts?" I asked Litsinger at her home.
"I've always been able to pick up and communicate with them. My daughter inherited the ability," she replied.
"But why do they stick around?" Why not go on "into the light" or wherever it is we end up, I inquired.
"God gives us freedom of choice on Earth, and if you die he doesn't take it away," she explained.
"Some stay behind to watch over loved ones or take care of things they needed to do and some people take time to realise they're dead." [snip]"-Reuters
ping to me for later rant...ahh...comment...LOL
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