It was one of the more depressingly ironic exchanges of the 2016 race so far: George Stephanopoulos, whose network refuses to play even one second of the Planned Parenthood videos, interrogating Carly Fiorina about what she said she saw watching them.
On Sept. 17, Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos interrogated Carly Fiorina about her comments on the Planned Parenthood videos during Wednesday’s GOP debate. Citing Vox, Stephanopoulos went so far as to suggest Fiorina may not have watched the videos. At the same time, his network, ABC, has not aired one second of the videos exposing Planned Parenthood (with audio) during its morning and evening news shows.
During the debate, Fiorina called upon President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to “watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”
“[A]nalysts who’ve watched all 12-plus hours say the scene you've described, that harrowing scene you described, actually isn't in those tapes,” Stephanopoulos challenged. “Did you misspeak?”
Fiorina denied his accusation. “No, I didn’t misspeak and I don’t know who you’re speaking about in terms of watching the tapes, but I have seen those images,” she said. “I don’t know whether you’ve watched the tapes, George. Most people haven't.”
Stephanopoulos, of course, stayed mum on whether or not he had watched the videos.
Instead, he cited a story by Vox writer Sara Kliff, who “watched all 12 hours” of the videos (in reality, there are more than 17 hours). Stephanopoulos quoted Kliff’s words on air: “Either Fiorina hasn't watched the Planned Parenthood videos or she is knowingly misrepresenting the footage, because what she says happens in the Planned Parenthood videos simply does not exist.”
Fiorina responded that “there's a lot of commentary about these tapes being doctored” before taking a slight jab at the media:
"In fact, that's what the mainstream media keeps talking about is the tapes and their origin. Rest assured, I have seen the images that I talked about last night. Rest assured that human lives are being aborted, fully formed, in order to harvest body parts."
Methodology: MRC Culture researched Nexis and watched the broadcast network news shows.
