An utterly false claim buried within a story about Planned Parenthood has served to showcase the degree to which the organization continues to benefit from friendly media coverage.
The Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the group behind a series of undercover videos of Planned Parenthood executives, suffered a legal setback Friday when federal judge William Orrick ruled that the group cannot plead the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid turning over evidence as part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by the National Abortion Federation.
But in writing about this court case, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Bob Egelko described the clash between CMP and Planned Parenthood in a manner that simply fabricates a narrative to the benefit of Planned Parenthood:
The Center for Medical Progress is the same organization that recorded and released heavily edited videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood members selling fetal parts, an impression contradicted by unedited videos released by Planned Parenthood.
As Egelko sums it up, CMP released a series of short, misleading videos, only for Planned Parenthood to strike back by releasing unedited tapes that were somehow in its possession. This description simply doesn’t mesh with reality in the slightest. CMP itself has consistently released its unedited raw footage concurrently with its flashier shorter videos, along with transcripts of said footage. The raw footage and transcripts can all be easily found right on CMP’s website. It’s not clear how Planned Parenthood would even have possession of unedited videos in the first place, since CMP did all the recordings itself and has never turned its tapes over to Planned Parenthood.
Egelko’s description of the videos as “heavily edited” also mimics Planned Parenthood’s preferred way of referring to CMP’s shorter videos.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Egelko to ask why he credited Planned Parenthood with releasing unedited footage, and whether the Chronicle intends to correct the sentence, but has not yet received a reply.
The Chronicle’s unfactual generosity towards Planned Parenthood is very similar to that shown by The New York Times in July. The Times stated twice in separate articles that CMP originally only released an edited tape before releasing raw footage after pressure from Planned Parenthood. Even though the Times’s mistake was pointed out immediately, the paper took several weeks to issue a correction.
This report, by Blake Neff, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
