A hidden camera investigation reveals corporate wrongdoing. The managers are caught not only describing unconscionable acts, but also joking about their victims.
In most cases, this would result in legislators raising holy hell and rushing to investigate and act. But when the corporation is Planned Parenthood, the industrial-scale abortionist, you can count on Democrats instead to pass special laws protecting it, and even to crack down on the whistleblowers.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a beneficiary of thousands of dollars from Planned Parenthood over the years, has charged two activists, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, with 15 felonies for their hidden-camera investigation of Planned Parenthood’s sale of body parts from aborted fetuses.
The criminal investigation leading up to Becerra’s prosecution began under his predecessor, now Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who fanatically supports the abortion industry, which reciprocates by sluicing money and political support into her re-election campaigns. Emails show that she coordinated with Planned Parenthood’s chief counsel to draft a law in response to the release of these videos, making illegal the publication of any “confidential” statement by a medical provider.
Planned Parenthood and many liberal commentators have claimed that Merritt and Daleiden deceptively edited their hidden-camera footage in order to give a misleading impression of what they showed. It isn’t true. In fact, they put 12 hours of footage online, unedited, which goes well beyond what most professional journalists do to demonstrate they did not merely exploit tiny snippets taken out of context.
But for the sake of argument, assume that they produced something highly misleading. In that case, the proper remedy would be a civil lawsuit for defamation, not a politically motivated criminal prosecution.
But Becerra is now throwing the book at Daleiden and Merritt. He is criminalizing precisely those methods that investigative journalists use to expose police abuse, child predators, political and corporate corruption, dishonest auto mechanics, animal abuse on corporate farms, child abuse by daycare providers and unsanitary practices in the food industry. Such journalistic tactics have also been used to expose medical quackery and unsanitary or inhumane hospital conditions, something that might in California now expose investigators to prosecution, thanks to Harris’ efforts.
What Becerra is trying to do, if a jury or judges let him get away with it, is a much more serious attack on the practice of journalism than any of President Trump’s intemperate comments about reporters or “fake news.” There is thus even more at stake in this case than just the barbaric practices admitted to by Planned Parenthood’s employees and affiliates on hidden camera.
Planned Parenthood has to be pleased. Yes, it faces some headwinds in Congress at the moment, with the House and Senate blocking the Obama administration’s attempt to establish its absolute right to federal funding. But it still receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, has an abundance of private donors and celebrities stumping on its behalf, and most importantly, it controls the law enforcement apparatus of the nation’s most populous state.
Instead of serving the public, California’s attorney general has made himself an errand-boy for an organization that performs roughly one-third of all abortions in America, and whose employees make jokes about the prices they can ask of laboratories for baby parts left over from abortions.
Daledein and Merritt may not be credentialed journalists, but their purpose was unquestionably journalistic — to gather and publish information of public interest about a practice they believed both illegal and repulsive. For good reasons (namely those enshrined in the First Amendment) there is no licensing requirement to do journalism. Nor does the law of California provide for criminal prosecutions for journalistic malpractice, even in cases where dishonest reporting results in defamation.
Harris and Becerra have abused their office. They are not only creating a new injustice, but one that could result in journalists facing prosecution for exposing a dishonest but politically well-connected doctor or hospital. All that, just to stick it to someone who revealed too much about friends and special interest benefactors of theirs who are fighting to perpetuate their monstrous business from public scrutiny.
