So, remember that time Planned Parenthood was busted chopping up children to make a boatload of profit, in violation of the law?
If you read Hot Air, or The Federalist, The Daily Caller, or LifeSiteNews, the answer is “yes.” But you might have missed it if you read the liberal press, writes Sean Davis:
So there’s a concerted effort from Planned Parenthood and it’s allies to “discourage[] [media outlets] from airing the undercover videos”? ….That would certainly go a long way towards explaining why so many left-leaning media outlets refused to cover the second video, which captured a senior Planned Parenthood executive noting that she needed a good deal on aborted baby organs because, “I want a Lamborghini.”
BuzzFeed, for example, still does not have a single story on its website noting Planned Parenthood’s aborted baby organs-for-Lambos scheme (coincidentally, SKDKnickerbocker recently hired former BuzzFeed reporter Kate Nocera to help handle PR work for its non-profit clients). Neither does Huffington Post. Neither does Vox. The story was trending on Facebook and Twitter, yet three sites that specialize in amplifying trending and viral content refused to print a single thing about the stories. Now we know why: Planned Parenthood likely told them not to.
Davis is engaging in a bit of mind-reading here, but he’s right that neither Huffington Post or Buzzfeed ran original articles about the second fetal parts video. And why is Planned Parenthood demanding that media outlets keep quiet about its practices? Why, for patients, of course:
Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota warned news outlets today that airing undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress [CMP] could violate “patient privacy.” Planned Parenthood says the videos violate laws; however, no wrong doing by the Center for Medical Progress has been proven.
In a supreme act of irony, Planned Parenthood accuses the Center for Medical Progress of breaking laws in order to accomplish its organizational goals (which is nothing like the partial-birth abortions and non-reporting of sex slaves and rape victims Planned Parenthood does during its “care” of women!):
When your network decides whether to consider this story newsworthy, or whether to use any of this footage at all, we urge you to keep this in mind: The extremists who entered Planned Parenthood labs under false pretenses violated research protocol, and, worse, violated the privacy of patients involved. Those patients’ privacy should not be further violated by having this footage shared by the media.
I guess this is what you do when you’re desperate to cover up the fact that your company commits wholesale slaughter of innocents and picks out the juiciest parts for sale — you demand that the media shut its trap, even as Congress begins to investigate you. In an e-mail to me, CMP senior investigator David Daleiden said Planned Parenthood’s claims are bunk:
The Center for Medical Progress follows all applicable laws in our investigative journalism work. Planned Parenthood cannot believe they were caught so flat-footed on selling baby parts and so they are just name-calling.
MRC’s Brent Bozell was…less than pleased:
The network media didn’t touch the third video. They didn’t show the menu of prices for aborted baby organs and they didn’t show the dismembered baby in a laboratory dish whose fingers you could count.
“That the media are refusing to cover these videos is appalling. That the media are taking their orders on what is and is not newsworthy from Planned Parenthood’s PR firm is journalistic malpractice. The American people have a right to know what Planned Parenthood is doing with the half a billion they receive from taxpayers. The media have a duty to report on what appears to be Planned Parenthood violating federal law and committing the most horrible atrocities the likes of which have not been seen since Nazi Germany.
My boss at LifeSiteNews, John-Henry Westen, put it well:
How dare Planned Parenthood say that the public seeing the dismembered bodies of their victims is a violation of privacy rights.
This is especially true when the public is paying for those bodies to be dismembered.
Note: I owe the commenters here at Hot Air a word of thanks. Last week, I wrote the following about the second fetal parts video: “I’m not sure the second video shows Dr. Gatter attempting to make a profit off of organ and parts sales…”
Rightly, the commenters here and a co-worker at LifeSiteNews reminded me that Gatter was negotiating over the price of fetal parts, which is certainly at odds with Planned Parenthood’s claim that it isn’t looking to make a profit off of the sales of parts. Somehow, in watching the video twice, this important fact slipped by me.
So, thanks.
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