Ken Berwitz
Media\’s effort to discredit the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the organization which put together those devastating, incriminating videos exposing Planned Parenthood, continues.
Let\’s see how the latest effort worked out…via this excerpt from Matthew Balan\’s blog at newsbusters.org (bold print is mine):
OnMonday\’s Anderson Cooper 360, CNN\’s Drew Griffin hounded David Daleiden of theCenter for Medical Progress over his insertion of outside footage into hisundercover videos that targeted Planned Parenthood\’s sale of aborted babies\’organs and tissue. Griffin underlined to Daleiden that “the problem peopleare having is, that this is not an aborted child…that does seem verydeceptive to me.” He also played up that “the confusion of DavidDaleiden\’s sloppy edits has made its way into the Republican presidentialrace.”
Thecorrespondent did also press Planned Parenthood Vice President Dawn Laguensover the “other parts of the tape that do seem to show bargaining,negotiating, pricing, and arranging the sales of body parts.” When hostAnderson Cooper wondered whether the videos were “heavily edited,” asLaguens claimed, Griffin replied, “the only thing we found were thesepictures that came out of nowhere that were dropped in.”
Griffin first zeroed inone of the Center for Medical Progress video that features former StemExpressemployee Holly O\’Donnell. As O\’Donnell described “holding that fetus in myhands when everybody else was busy, and started crying,” the video cuts toa still image of a dead second-trimester baby. The CNN correspondent pointedout that “there\’s a problem: the baby Holly O\’Donnell is talking about isnot the baby shown in the video.
Allow me to translate: If you read the entire blog – as I hope you do – you will find CNN looked and looked at those videos – which is more than just about any other mainstream media venue admits to doing. And it found that when Holly O\’Donnell described holding the fetus, CMP inserted an image of a fetus at that stage of development, to show what it would have looked like to Ms. O\’Donnell.
That\’s it. That\’s what they found. In all the hours of video provided by CMP, it found no editing of tapes to change what people said, no doctoring of anything to change what happened…just the insertion of an illustrative image so people would get a visual of what someone was talking about.
In other words, it found that the videos were not doctored or edited in some nefarious way to make things seem different than what they were.
The blog makes it clear that this pained Drew Griffin something awful, because he kept harping on that one image, instead of talking about the videos\’ massive amount of incriminating material.
And yet, dishearteningly, this is the good news.
I call this awful reporting good news because I am unaware that ABC, or NBC, or CBS – and certainly not MSNBC – have reported on the videos at all, other than to recite Planned Parenthood\’s accusations of how heavily they were doctored/edited…with no specific examples at all (which, based on CNN\’s analysis, is because they are not there to be found).
This is what passes for journalism today, folks. How do you like it?
