A Beautiful Image the Media Will Never Reveal

This story comes from David Bayly, blogging from Woodside. Baylyblog.



Steve and Tony Sakac of Virginia, father and son, outside Woodside Hospice



"Earlier this evening twenty-two anti-Terri demonstrators showed up, the largest group thus far.

They set up shop on the media side of the street, to the east of main hospice entrance, across from several families with children. Their placards and signs were accompanied by slurs directed at families across the street.

Tragic, but endurable. But then they decided to move position. Where to? The narrow strip of land between the two front drives which the news media and professional protestors have turned into the press conference area.

Perhaps the lure of the Sean Hannity show filming diagonally across the street brought them over…

But by entering that section of protest land they entered the fence-enclosed space where a father had brought his brain-damaged son, a son in precisely the same condition as Terri.

There was the father Steve Sakac, standing and holding his dear son, Tony, and there came the protestors shouting, “Let Terri die.”

Pro-Terri groups from both sides of the drive converged on the area, surrounding the vile protestors. There was shouting. Police refused to intervene.

Praise God for the protestors who peacefully surrounded the anti-Terri group and sang them into silence.

But when the media converged, did they pay the slightest attention to the father and son at the center of the action? Of course not. They studiously ignored them. I told one photographer, a man who shoots photographs for Time and Newsweek, that it was time for him to cover both sides of the story as he claims to. He looked away. There were at least four television cameras filming the confrontation. NOT ONE took any footage of the father and son at the heart of the dispute. You will only see a confrontation. You will never see this image of that which lay at the heart of the dispute."