Reuters’ “Five Facts” About Kevorkian

This Reuters sugar piece on Kevorkian leaves out some of the most pertinent parts of his story.

Here are five other facts that would seem to be more relevant than Kevorkian teaching himself Japanese:

1. The majority of his assisted suicides were not people with terminal illnesses, and indeed, five were not sick upon autopsy.
2. Kevorkian ripped the kidneys from one of his latter assisted suicides and offering them up at a news conference for transplantation.
3. Kevorkian wanted to experiment on men/women being executed.
4. Kevorkian began his assisted suicide campaign in order to be able to conduct “obitiatry,” that is, euthanasia coupled with human vivisection.
5. Kevorkian advocated setting up regional euthanasia clinics to which anyone with a determined desire to die could attend.

Over the years, the media has barely covered these matters. But surely they are important to reaching a judgment about Kevorkian and his actions. This is precisely why the media is deemed untrustworthy by a growing number of people: They frequently leave out facts that are relevant and pertinent—but which get in the way of the “story” they want to tell.