Is Chen Guangcheng a rebel without a cause?

Chen Guangcheng is a Chinese “dissident” and a “lawyer” who was jailed by the Chinese government and held in house arrest after his sentence, until he escaped over the weekend, presumably to U.S. custody.

You’ll learn all that from this 1300-word Washington Post story today, but you’ll never learn why the Communist Chinese regime wanted to silence him -- that he has exposed the horrors of China’s one-child policy, including forced abortions and forced sterilizations.

Honestly. Search the article. “Abortion” never appears. Nor does “one-child” “family-planning,” or “sterilization.”

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Of the five Post news articles I found discussing Chen, only one of them has the word "abortion."

The Post wasn’t the only one to make this weird omission. CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell doesn’t mention abortion, sterilization, or the one-child policy at all.

Others simply buried this detail, making sure to describe Chen generically as a “legal activist”

Reuters, in the 13^th paragraph, mentions that Chen “campaigned against abortions forced under China's ‘one child’ policy.”

I think pretty early this week, the media will begin to feel more comfortable discussing the substantive matters at hand – forced abortions and forced sterilizations. But for now, those ugly issues are too hot for our media handle, it appears.