If you want a good idea of how much water the media is willing to carry for Planned Parenthood, go ahead and check out this Politico story. It seems Planned Parenthood commissioned a “forensic report” to analyze the undercover videos that have got the organization in trouble for harvesting and selling fetal organs, and leaked it to Politico. This is an obvious PR move and should be a non-story but naturally, headline at Politico is “Report for Planned Parenthood finds sting videos manipulated.” But despite that favorable headline, the results of the study — which given the circumstances that brought it about — seem somewhat mixed [emphasis added]:
But the firm also wrote that it is impossible to characterize the extent to which the edits and cuts distort the meaning of the conversations depicted and that there was no “widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.”
But one other detail caught my eye that bears mentioning: “The report by research firm Fusion GPS, which was obtained by POLITICO, attempts to undermine the videos’ political, legal, and journalistic value.”
Just who, exactly, is behind Fusion GPS? Turns out it’s an opposition research firm with ties to the Democratic party and has a history of harassing socially conservative Republican donors, possibly on behalf of the Obama campaign:
Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot’s home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is “a commercial research firm.”
Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn’t say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target because of “his record on gay issues.”
Politico should have mentioned this. But the pro-life movement has never gotten a fair shake from the media, and it seems that’s not about to change.
UPDATE — A fellow journalist alerts me to the New York Times’s favorable write-up of the same report. The Times only identifies Fusion GPS in the following way, and doesn’t mention any details that might undermine the report’s credibility:
