Gosnell etc. - double standards prevail

Elizabeth Scalia at First Things [here] writing about the self-imposed silence of much of the western media about the Gosnell trial:

"...Do a quick run-through of the search engines. Beyond some perfunctory coverage on the day the Gosnell story broke, there has been little attention paid, no follow-up by the mainstream media. This is an ugly story; it touches too many social shibboleths and indicts too many philosophies. The press wants Kermit Gosnell and his scissors to go away, and to that end they are simply not talking about him..."

And, in terms of the U.K. media,  it's not a British story (at least as yet) but that's not usually sufficient reason to ignore something of this magnitude of horror...

There's a less than  convincing counter-argument here, although the final assertion that the media shy away from anything which makes their audience feel too uncomfortable contains a kernel of truth - if not the whole truth...
Even a' free press,' then, can be an illusory concept when (liberal-left)  ideological self-censorship prevails across the newsrooms.

Tim Stanley at The Telegraph on the dispute between the BBC and the LSE [here] over undercover journalistic participation in  a recent student visit to North Korea:

"...So the LSE is seriously saying that Sweeney’s crime was to imperil future visits by the LSE to tyrannical regimes on the pretext of academic research. Yet, the research benefits of remaining on good terms with foreign dictatorships are not at all obvious. As Sweeney astutely argues, North Korea is a “Nazi state”. Any tour of it is highly stage-managed and offers no access to ordinary people, no visits to archives and no obvious research potential. Going there would be about as academically enriching as attending a Nuremberg rally in 1935. “Legitimate study” is virtually impossible. So why is the LSE so keen to retain access to North Korea?..."

And a report from the BBC itself here
Nothing new here really: modern academia consistently takes a view, say, towards the (democratic) State of Israel which it conspicuously fails to follow when dealing with tyrannies.