On July 20, The New York Times published a story about the recent spate of undercover videos that show Planned Parenthood affiliates unethically and possibly illegally brokering fetal parts to medical researchers. The story, headlined “Planned Parenthood Tells Congress More Videos of Clinics Might Surface,” ended with this paragraph:
The way the New York Times reported this, it could be read to suggest Daleiden only released the unedited footage after whatever narrative he wanted to put forth from the edited footage had taken hold. But the indisputable fact is that the edited version of the encounter with Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services at Planned Parenthood, and the unedited footage were released within seconds of each other.
Sure enough, two days after the Times’s report, a Times editorial used the error to argue the videos were intentionally deceptive:
The report and the editorial remain uncorrected. This error has been already been publicly pointed out at a variety of media outlets, and there have been many missives on social media directed at reporter Jackie Calmes and New York Times editors. The fact this hasn’t been fixed after two weeks is unacceptable for any responsible news outlet, let alone one that enjoys a reputation as the “paper of record.”
UPDATE — The Times has finally issued a correction:
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the timing of the release of what they said was a full-length, unedited video of a Planned Parenthood employee talking about how much clinics charge for specimens. While the full-length video of more than two hours took longer to download than the nearly nine-minute edited footage, the full video was in fact posted at the same time as the edited version. It is not the case that the full video was released “after Planned Parenthood complained of selective, misleading editing.”
The editorial citing this fact remains uncorrected, however.
