Participants in this year’s March for Life 2013, marking the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, seemed less bothered by the mainstream media’s lack of coverage of the estimated half-million people descending on Washington, D.C. to demonstrate against abortion on Friday. That’s because they relied heavily on social media to help shine the spotlight on the movement.
Outside the march, supporters of the pro-life movement were not deterred either. Pope Benedict XVI gave a shout-out on Twitter in nine languages. “I join all those marching for life from afar, and pray that political leaders will protect the unborn and promote a culture of life,” Benedict tweeted. The Pope has 2.5 million followers on Twitter in just six-week time since he began using the social media heavyweight.
“We have the biggest social media movement online for the pro-life movement educating almost a million people a week with the truth about human life and abortion,” Lila Rose of Action Network, a pro-life investigative journalism group, told Fox News. “Our Facebook at over 430,000 is bigger than Planned Parenthood’s Facebook and they’re a billion dollar abortion chain.”
While TV reports on the march were scarce, a quick Google search Friday evening showed minimal mainstream online media coverage as well. The news of Burt Reynold’s bout with the flu that landed him in the hospital took the top-center slot at CNN.com, while the March for Life story was nowhere to be found on its homepage.
Apparently, even the intense chatter from pro-life supporters on Twitter wasn’t enough to convince most newsrooms of the newsworthiness simply because of the large number of protesters alone.
