Network and cable TV news are coming under fire for repeatedly smearing as “heavily edited” the controversial secretly taped Planned Parenthood videos of officers discussing the sale of aborted fetus parts.
After Tuesday’s five-hour House hearing on the issue with witness Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, the media is being slammed for doing exactly what the producer of the videos did — and worse — editing hours of tape for a watchable news segment.
Main critic L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, even demanded that TV post all raw news footage like the Planned Parenthood video team has so that viewers can compare it to the edited down stories.
Yesterday’s hearing provided a huge opening for media critics to fight back against the charge that the Planned Parenthood videos were edited to make the organization look especially bad.
One glaring example: NBC Nightly News coughed up just 64 seconds from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, including a clip of Richards slamming the videos as “heavily edited.”
Then Wednesday on CNN, video producer David Daleiden, executive director of the Center for Medical Progress, was interrogated on his editing by host Chris Cuomo. Daleiden said that just like CNN, he produced “summary videos” for public consumption. He added that the full footage is on the Center’s YouTube channel.
Cuomo talked about “having the pleasure, mispleasure, displeasure” of viewing the raw footage and summary video. He said, “they’re not the same. When you edit, you make choices.” Daleiden said he made no changes.
The videos were from hundreds of hours of secretly taped interviews then edited down to the key parts. Critics, including the media, have mounted an attack in suggesting that the videos were edited to make Planned Parenthood look worse than the evidence they sold off body parts.
But Bozell ripped that argument, as has Daleiden, who led the Planned Parenthood video project.
Letter from @CecileRichards ADMITS our 2 main points: 1) #PPSellsBabyParts at $60/part, 2) @PPact changes procedures http://t.co/WxT0gHQ3zl
— David Daleiden (@daviddaleiden) August 27, 2015
“The hypocrisy meter is going off the charts at CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS. In their reporting about the Planned Parenthood videos, they refer to them as ‘edited’ or ‘heavily edited.’ Well guess what? Each and every day these same TV news outlets edit and heavily edit their own news segments — including their stories about the Planned Parenthood videos,” said Bozell.
He added: “The difference between these networks and the Center for Medical Progress is that CMP is far more honest and transparent in disclosing the full footage and posting it online. These ‘news’ networks have a responsibility to do the same. Today, I am calling on CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS to make public all the footage they collect for all of the news segments they produce, just as the Center for Medical Progress has done. Until they do, they have no right to question CMP’s professionalism.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
