Censoring the Real Planned Parenthood

After six devastating hidden-camera interviews, the best Planned Parenthood and its top-dollar crisis managers can muster in their defense is to protest that they were “heavily edited.”

Of course they were. All video is edited. It’s why they call it “produced.” Without offering evidence of exculpatory evidence withheld, the charge is as meaningless as Planned Parenthood is evil.

Something else has been heavily edited, in fact so completely edited that virtually nothing remains.

Have you seen any of this Planned Parenthood video — any of the six separate videos — on the news?

Since the Planned Parenthood house of horrors videos first emerged several weeks ago, ABC, CBS, and NBC have devoted 23.5 minutes to the story on their morning and evening news shows. By contrast, the killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe by an American dentist has spurred 97.5 minutes of coverage on those same shows. (And we’re not counting another 45 minutes of “20/20” and “Nightline” coverage on ABC.)

The death of one lion is four times more important than the revelation that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts of aborted babies, sometimes unbeknownst even to their mothers.

Or look at this way. In 2012, these same networks offered 96 minutes in just three and a half days to Sen. Todd Akin’s claim that pregnancies can’t happen in a “legitimate rape.” So a pro-life gaffe is roughly four times more important, in a relative fraction of the time, than an expose of pro-abortion butchery and organ harvesting.

But dig deeper into this shallow pool of 23 minutes, and the networks’ agenda gets far more obvious. They have almost completely censored the actual video of the Planned Parenthood officials incriminating themselves. If you rely on the broadcast television networks for your news, here’s what you’ve seen from the actual videos: 73 seconds. CBS has aired just one minute of damning footage, which is a lot more than NBC, which has devoted just 13 seconds to that footage, which is more than ABC, which has aired zilch, nada, nothing.

This refusal to air footage needs to become an issue right now, before the pro-abortion left start hitting the “old news” button. Let’s briefly review what these censors would like to think is not newsworthy in the videos from Planned Parenthood officials. Virtually everything that follows has been censored, or given absolutely minimalist coverage.

TAPE ONE: Dr. Deborah Nucatola on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.” CBS and NBC ran a few clips. But then …

TAPE TWO: Dr. Mary Gatter joking “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiates the best price for baby parts.

TAPE THREE: A Nexis search for “Holly O'Donnell” — the tissue specialist for Stem Express who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic and who said she fainted in horror over handling baby legs — turns up zero mentions on the networks.

TAPE FOUR: Dr. Savita Ginde unequivocally states “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughs as they look at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”

TAPE FIVE: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasts of their skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”

TAPE SIX: Tissue specialist Holly O'Donnell asserts that some technicians are taking fetal parts without the mother’s consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”

And no network has shown a single second of the horrific footage of the actual dismembered body parts of these little babies.

Most Americans are unaware or just dimly aware of this outrageous scandal. A Monmouth University poll asked the public if they had seen the story on Planned Parenthood “supposedly” selling baby parts. Fifty-three percent said they had not heard. Of the 47 percent those who had, 21 percent said they only heard “a little.”

Maintaining that level of ignorance about the reality of Planned Parenthood’s business is the goal of the “news” media.

The Patriot Post® · Censoring the Real Planned Parenthood