CBS: More undercover Planned Parenthood videos on the way

When the group Center for Medical Progress released the now-infamous lunchtime conversation with Planned Parenthood’s senior medical adviser, some wondered why the group waited a year to publish the video. CBS News picked up the story this morning, with Jan Crawford giving an unsurprisingly fair report on the nearly three-year probe. There is more coming, Crawford reports — much more:

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Planned Parenthood blasted the “heavily edited video” as the work of “extreme anti-abortion activists.”

David Daleiden is founder of the group that took the video.

“I think these are really horrific and troubling actions for 99 percent of Americans,” Daleiden said.

“Planned Parenthood is still receiving $50, $75, sometimes $100 per specimen per fetal part. So all of that is just straight up profit that goes to their bottom line,” Daleiden added.

Even if it’s done legally, medical ethicists question whether Planned Parenthood should be in the business of providing fetal tissue.

“You’ve got to be sure that it’s the patient, the woman who is at the center of your concern and nothing else is diverting from that,” Dr. Arthur Caplan of NYU’s Langone Medical Center said. “Supplying fetal tissue from the remains to third parties is diverting. I would not do it.”

Planned Parenthood keeps insisting that the video is “heavily edited,” but the group released the entire 2-hour, 42-minute conversation nearly simultaneously. The transcript has been available almost as long. Other media outlets keep repeating this claim not as quotes from Planned Parenthood but as factual statements in their own reports. That includes this nonsense from The Daily Beast’s Samantha Allen, who profiles David Daleiden as an “extremist” who has copied Live Action’s pattern of using “heavily edited videos”:

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The Mona Lisa Project was an undercover video series produced by Live Action in which Rose posed as a 13-year-old girl who had supposedly been impregnated by an adult and spoke with a nurse’s aide at a Bloomington, Indiana Planned Parenthood. The nurse appeared to coach her on how to get an abortion while avoiding mandatory reporting laws, which would have required the clinic to report statutory rape. The aide was later fired.

It may also be one of the only sting videos Rose made that captured any actual wrongdoing.

Rose has gone on to release several videos inside Planned Parenthood clinics that closely resemble the style of yesterday’s video release from the CMP: heavily-edited and full of misdirection. In 2011, for instance, when Daleiden was still with the organization, Live Action actors went undercover as a pimp and a sex worker asking Planned Parenthood workers about abortion access for underage sex workers. The FBI looked into the video and did not prosecute.

We covered the Mona Lisa Project pretty heavily at Hot Air, and I also recall that Live Action released the full, unedited videotapes either simultaneously or very nearly so on every release. This is an odd action for news organizations to criticize anyway. What reports done by any media outlets are not “heavily edited” for broadcast or publication? Does 60 Minutes run raw interview footage? Do any of the broadcast news networks run all of the raw footage from their own undercover operations on broadcast? Do they even make it available on the Internet? Usually not.

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Tellingly, the only citation Allen uses to “prove” Lila Rose got something wrong in editing one of her videos comes from … Media Matters. That’s almost as pathetic as using Think Progress, Amanda Marcotte, and the Daily Dot to claim media vindication — which is what Planned Parenthood tried yesterday:

This story isn’t going away. Kudos to Crawford and CBS for giving viewers a balanced look at the actual issues. Perhaps the Daily Beast can take a cue from Crawford.

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David Strom 5:20 PM | April 15, 2024
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