Mounting pushback online over media coverage of rising abortion rate
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There was a time when mainstream media could suppress major stories of public interest without facing any fallout. That era is over – and it must be deeply unsettling for them.
Last Friday, under the cover of night, the Government sheepishly released the latest abortion figures. It was a quiet disclosure – just enough for media outlets to claim plausible deniability. The figure: 10,852 abortions in Ireland in 2024, a 280% increase from the 2,879 abortions reported in 2018.
Predictably, most major outlets remained silent. But over the weekend, social media ignited. People questioned the conspicuous media silence surrounding them. As the new week began, that pressure began to work. Gradually and reluctantly, media outlets started covering the story they had tried to ignore.
If the story had been one that favoured the pro-abortion side, there’s simply no way it would have taken so long to make the news. Everyone knows – despite media protestations to the contrary – it would have remained a headline story on RTÉ and other outlets all weekend long, flooding the airwaves with pro-abortion propaganda.
While the mainstream media eventually got around to reporting the numbers – prompted in no small way by the backlash on social media – the reporting to date has been very tokenistic and grudging, with no serious effort being made to examine or question the pro-abortion position and the devastating consequences of the new law.
On the few occasions that the national media conducted interviews on the subject this week, they were polite nodding sessions, full of carefully curated questions. A case in point was Newstalk’s Kieran Cuddihy and his interview with abortion-supporting medic Dr Madeleine Ní Dhálaigh.
Cuddihy asked one softball question after another and allowed Ní Dhálaigh to recycle the same false and misleading claim over and over that the abortions being carried out under the new law are an integral part of ‘healthcare’ and constitute necessary medical ‘treatments’.
Only when subjected to these hollow, performative interviews does it truly hit home how far journalistic standards in Ireland have dropped – and how much the public are being taken for fools.
Credit where it’s due though: local media continues to value honest debate, setting a much higher bar than their national counterparts. They proved that again this week. | 
