MEDIA DISHONESTY – AT 9:55 A.M. ET:  There seems to be so much of it these days.  Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, or somewhere in between, one has to be appalled by the way major news organizations are ignoring the Planned Parenthood videos.  It demonstrates, if we needed proof, that many journalists today don't believe it is their role to give us the news, but, rather, to "make a difference."  From Newsbusters: 

On Tuesday night, the decision by the major broadcast networks to erase the Planned Parenthood scandal from their newscasts continued with the release of a sickening third video by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) that again discussed the selling of body parts from aborted babies.

As the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC were ignoring this third video, the trio spent six minutes and 26 seconds teasing and reporting on the "outrage" surrounding the shooting death of a high-profile African lion in Zimbabwe by an American dentist.

While reporting on the lion’s death may be all fine and good, it certainly says something about the networks when they neglect to even mention a horrifying video about aborted babies.

With the English networks, Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Univison, and PBS appearing to have deleted this scandal from their airwaves, the Fox News Channel (FNC) newscast Special Report led with the story and spent six minutes and 40 second on both the third video and the move by Planned Parenthood to remove the list of corporate donors from their website.

Off the top of the show, host Bret Baier explained that the “very bad summer for Planned Parenthood is a lot worse tonight” with “pro-life groups gathering across the nation demand an end to federal funding of the organization” in addition the “third and most graphic undercover video” that’s “shocking even hard-core abortion foes.”

Covering the video’s release, chief legal correspondent Shannon Bream reported that the third video from “the Center for Medical Progress shows a tissue procurement buyer inside a clinic talking to a doctor about pricing for parts and organs from a fetus that was just over 11 weeks into a pregnancy.”

On the heels of the CMP video, Bream mentioned that there were pro-life rallies “[i]n more than 60 U.S. cities” that “call[ed] for investigations into recent allegations regarding Planned Parenthood's harvesting and transfer of aborted fetal remains along with pressure on lawmakers to follow through on pledges to defund the organization.”

COMMENT:  For years certain news organizations have ignored the major pro-life rallies that take place in Washington annually.  It's as if they never happened. 

And part of the Planned Parenthood story is the attempt by some political factions to investigate the filmmakers who made the videos, rather than Planned Parenthood.  You would think that journalists would be sensitive to this attempt to shut down a news source, but many journalists are only sensitive to assaults on news gathering if the assaults are directed at people they agree with. 

July 29, 2015