The nation’s largest provider of abortions received $564 million in taxpayer funding between 2017 and 2018, during which time it terminated an estimated 332,757 pregnancies. As Planned Parenthood is the beneficiary of taxpayers’ mandatory generosity, it owes it to its benefactors to be transparent about how it runs its operation. It owes it to the public, for example, to answer questions including, “Who in the news media registered for Planned Parenthood’s media happy hour last week despite the requirement of signing a nondisclosure agreement?”
Vice News’s Carter Sherman reported on Nov. 22 that, “Planned Parenthood asked reporters attending a happy hour for media professionals this week to abide by nondisclosure agreements, a request that can stifle reporters’ ability to do their job.”
Sherman reports the organization quickly withdrew the NDA requirement after she informed a Planned Parenthood staffer that she planned to write about its highly unusual legal demand.
But as bad as the short-lived NDA demand is, something more troubling caught my eye in the Vice article. It is the passage that reads: “After I pushed back … and said that I’d be writing a story about the organization’s use of the legal agreement for reporters, a Planned Parenthood staffer sent an email to all journalists registered for the event saying none of them would have to comply with an NDA” [emphasis added].
The nondisclosure agreement was a prerequisite to attending the Planned Parenthood-sponsored media happy hour. That means “media professionals” registered for the event despite the demand they sign an NDA. How many supposed news media professionals were apparently OK entering into an uncommon and oppressive legal requirement demanded by a politically active and publicly-funded organization?
This seems like a problem. A big one. There is more.
Sherman reports that this is the second time that Planned Parenthood had asked her to sign an NDA as a precondition to covering one of its events.
“In 2018,” the reporter writes, “when I was signing up to cover the organization’s ‘Power of Pink’ volunteer training in Detroit, I realized that the registration included signing an NDA that would restrict me from sharing ‘confidential information.’”
She adds, “That essentially included anything I learned ‘through any means of communication or observation’ from anyone affiliated with Planned Parenthood, which has positioned itself as a bulwark against an administration that regularly attacks press credibility.”
Planned Parenthood’s senior communications director, Erica Sackin, claimed it is not official policy for the organization to ask media professionals to sign a nondisclosure agreement for admittance to Planned Parenthood-sponsored events.
“Our interactions with reporters around this have been less than perfect,” she told Vice. “It is not — and has not been — our official policy to require any reporter to sign an NDA that would prevent them from reporting an event we’re asking them to cover, or for informal, off-the-record events.”
Sackin added, “In instances when we have asked reporters to do so, it has been the result of miscommunication and misunderstanding between staff, or of staff members out of an abundance of caution enforcing rules that should not apply to journalists.”
This does not quite match up with Sherman’s experiences. She reports:
That’s also what I was told in 2018, when I emailed a different Planned Parenthood employee, with whom I’d been speaking about attending the convention, and told them I felt uncomfortable signing the NDA.
The staffer promised to ask the legal team if I could get around it. But, they added, “Our policy is to have all people who enter our event spaces people sign an NDA (with allowances for journalists to report) so we would need sign off from our legal department to register you without one.”
What does “allowances for journalists to report” mean? I asked.
“I was just referring to the fact that [the] wording of the NDA doesn’t preclude journalists from speaking to folks on the record,” the staffer said. “It’s not written as such specifically for journalists, but there’s a section on rightfully receiving confidential information from a Third Party.”
[…]
A former Planned Parenthood staffer said Friday that at the time of the 2018 “Power of Pink” convention, similar invitations that included non-disclosure agreements had been sent to other journalists, for other events. The staffer also said Friday that in their experience, reporters hadn’t pushed back on the NDA and had published stories without any problems.
The backdoor that Planned Parenthood created to register me for the convention was used — at least for a time — to register journalists for other events, according to the staffer.
But back to that happy hour event last week: I would like very much to know which reporters registered even though they knew it came with the demand of an NDA.
“We pride ourselves on our transparency and our support for freedom of the press as a pillar of our democracy,” Sackin told Vice.
I asked representatives for Planned Parenthood if they could tell me which reporters, if any, agreed to the nondisclosure agreements prior to the so-called women’s health group withdrawing its request. The representatives did not respond to my request for comment. I suspect they never will.
