Is the media ignoring the 'House of Horrors' murder trial?

"This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women," the grand jury report in the case of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell begins.

Gosnell is charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, and the specific details of the alleged crimes are gruesome and disturbing. The abortion clinic where he worked has been dubbed a "House of Horrors," and the grand jury report is loaded with graphic accounts of mutilation, evisceration, and violent, unsanitary late-term abortions.

Gosnell's trial began in mid-March, but despite the incredibly visceral content, it initially garnered little attention in the national media. Now, some on the right are pointing to that dearth of coverage as a sign of liberal media bias.

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Here's Red State's Erick Erickson:

Similarly, NewsBusters, a group dedicated to "exposing & combating liberal media bias," argues that President Obama and the media used the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary to launch a major policy debate, but that their silence here is revealing.

Many others have leveled similar claims, with Breitbart alleging "a full-blown, coordinated blackout throughout the entire national media." A group of anti-abortion House members have even demanded to know if there is a national "media cover-up" afoot.

The criticism reached a head Thursday when Fox News' Kirsten Powers wrote an op-ed for USA Today shaming the media and declaring, "This should be front page news." According to Powers, none of the three major networks covered the case in the past three months, while the New York Times published just one original story, tucked deep within the paper, on the trial's opening day.

Without hurling accusations of media bias, other news watchers have also questioned why the story hasn't been consistently front page news. "The news value is undeniable," says The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, who notes that he wasn't aware of the story until it spawned such an intense outcry on Thursday.

"To sum up, this story has numerous elements any one of which would normally make it a major story. And setting aside conventions, which are flawed, this ought to be a big story on the merits," he says.

So why hasn't it gotten the wall-to-wall coverage it seemingly deserves?

One response has been that the media did, in fact, cover the story — back in 2011 when it first broke. Gosnell was arrested in January 2011, but the story receded from the headlines over the ensuing two years.

Here's Salon's Irin Carmon, who on Friday posted an exhaustive response to the accusations of liberal bias directly titled, "There is no Gosnell coverup":

Another response is that the story, for all its intrigue, is arguably a local one at this point. While it touches on several hot-button issues with national implications, the fact that it hasn't been covered ad nauseam is hardly a sign of political media bias. Even some critics now alleging liberal media bias have at the same time noted that the local media has been all over the story.

"If it were a rogue banker, I'd want to highlight it too," says Kevin Drum of the liberal magazine Mother Jones. "But that wouldn't mean the rest of the media would somehow be implicated in a conspiracy if they didn't follow my lead."

Slate's Dave Weigel offers a similar take, shooting down a comparison one commentator floated between the media's coverage of the Gosnell case and the Trayvon Martin shooting, another local crime story, but one that received endless national coverage.