Posted by Susan Swift Feb 3rd 2011 at 1:10 pm in Abortion, Associated Press, Huffington Post, Mainstream Media, Media Matters, citizen journalism, media bias In the journalistic blockbuster videos posted at Breitbart‘s Big Government and Big Journalism, Live Action exposes Planned Parenthood’s apparent complicity in putative underage sex-slave rings in New Jersey and, most recently, Virginia. And the Make-Believe Media has circled the wagons around Planned Parenthood with obfuscated timelines and strawman arguments attempting to salvage PP’s public reputation.
Tipped off to this impending public relations disaster, last week PP announced – and the MBM dutifully reported – a purported FBI investigation of this undercover sting, implying that PP had discovered and quickly reported this possible criminal ring of underage sex traders. Even the AP’s all-important Orwellian title “Planned Parenthood Seeks FBI Probe” implies a valiant PP calling for an FBI investigation of these criminals who sought PP’s advice in trafficking child sex slaves.
Yet, the videos appear to show billion-dollar corporation Planned Parenthood conspiring with child-prostitution hustlers. Damning stuff? Provocative, at least? Well, no, not to some elements of the MBM.
Profoundly indifferent whether or not PP in fact cooperated with child sex pimps, these media have instead spotted a far more sinister scheme – the covert videotaping by these amateur sleuths from LiveAction.
Fiends! Lucky for Abraham Zapruder that Media Matters, DailyKos, HuffingtonPost and similar Fever Swamp media weren’t around during the JFK assassination – their headlines would be screaming for his indictment.
The real wrongdoing according to these media paragons (never mind the child pimp thing) is that the first video out of New Jersey is … edited!! “Oh gee if only LiveAction hadn’t cut out the part when Planned Parenthood manager Amy Woodruff jumps up from her desk yelling ‘Surprise! Fooled ya!’ and her coworkers spring from behind desks and doors yelling ‘gotcha!.’” Why was that omitted from the video? I mean, other than that it never happened? See the full New Jersey video here.
Media Matters shrugs off Planned Parenthood’s child sex pimping with the fatuous excuse that PP publicized last week that it had notified the FBI of a possible “hoax” by LiveAction – ignoring the crucial detail that this publication occurred only after PP identified one of the undercover sleuths as being connected with LiveAction, meaning that PP management obviously knew it was about to be eviscerated … yet again … by another undercover LiveAction video, and that it needed to immediately launch into emergency spin control mode, aided dutifully by its Make-Believe Media puppets.
Typifying this inane spin, DailyKos, writing yet another chapter on Spin Control for Dummies, reported that Planned Parenthood representatives “instantly realized they were probably being punked.” While perversely untrue, you need only watch the (New Jersey) video yourself and see whether the PP representative “instantly realized she was being punked.”
Helped by those in the MBM, here’s the sum up of PP’s alternative reality defense play:
(1) We knew it had the “earmarks of a hoax” and played along … really well;
(2) if you don’t believe #1 then the video evidence is “maliciously edited,” unfair and just plain mean spirited, even if it is true, so don’t watch it;
(3) even if what we did was wrong, we reported that LiveAction was wrong to film us doing it, so any sneaky stuff we did wrong doesn’t count now;
and finally, the throw-’em-under-the-bus defense:
(4) PP’s loyal New Jersey office manager, Amy Woodruff, caught on tape was simply going rogue. We’ve already given her an administrative abortion … uhh … termination, anything to save the life of the mother. Of course, this latter defense becomes more precarious as more videos are released, as with the Virginia video released today.
Ultimately, as horrific an exposition of corruption inside Planned Parenthood the videos present, it also exposes perhaps worse corruption – a Make-Believe Media’s blind and obeisant allegiance to institutions such as Planned Parenthood and their afrank unwillingness to consider the abhorrent implications meaning of the videos they are watching.
But wait…there’s more. Lila Rose and pro-life advocates could be the new right-wing terrorists the Left has hoped for. Incredibly, last week in anticipation of the video release, the AP uncritically regurgitated Planned Parenthood’s overtly malicious effort to link the undercover pro-life whistleblowers to mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner.
The AP report invoked the Arizona shooting in a despicable effort to revive the mantra of rightwing radicalism:
The (undercover video) visits were made between Jan. 11 and Jan. 15 to health centers in Virginia, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Arizona. Among them was a clinic in Tucson, Ariz., which Planned Parenthood said was visited on the 15th, a week after the shooting rampage in that city that critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.” [PP’s VIP for Communications, Stuart] Schear said he and his colleagues found it striking that the clinic in Tucson was among those visited, so soon after the shooting rampage. ‘It shows how far some people will go,’ he said.Instead of blaming whistleblowers for exposing corruption, shouldn’t the media actually investigate the wrongdoing contained in the videos? And how many “isolated instances” of corruption must be exposed on video? To paraphrase an old idiom, once is an accident, twice is a pattern, and three times is a conspiracy. If the management at Planned Parenthood is religious, they might want to start praying there are no more videos – that may be their only remaining defense.
Big Journalism
