Since the moment the Center for Medical Progress began dropping its series of videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in human organ trafficking—organs harvested from the bodies obtained by abortion—the media response has been anything but journalistically defensible.
Despite the shocking footage in the very first video, the same media that took mere minutes to publicize far less shocking undercover revelations had to be shamed into even mentioning it. Sadly, that first day’s journalism might have been the best coverage to date. Since then, most of the media coverage can be categorized into straight-up ignoring the claims in the video or making excuses for Planned Parenthood, an organization journalists have an enduring loyalty to.
The media corruption on this topic is so deep and so vast that fighting it can seem like trying to stop a high-powered locomotive by standing in front of it. But in the hope that any portion of the populace—regardless of their views on abortion or affiliated practices—cares about the media having any healthy relationship to truth, media critics should record what’s happened since mid-July, when this story broke.
This is just a small example of how the media manipulation on this story has operated, but it’s illustrative nonetheless.
Within hours of the first video coming out, Planned Parenthood started issuing talking points in response. They knew it would be a public-relations nightmare, and they had to say something. They went with a tried-and-true tactic when they’d been busted undercover for seeming to approve of racism or underage sex trafficking. They said the videos were “edited.” They also said, “highly edited,” “deceptively edited,” and the like. Perhaps you have heard this claim uttered roughly eleventy billion times by Planned Parenthood and its media defenders.
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