Both Media Matters and U.S. News have supported Planned Parenthood – through the same employee.
U.S. News & World Report editor Emily Arrowood recently defended Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards after she testified last Tuesday before the House Oversight Committee in regards to the videos exposing the abortion giant’s harvesting of aborted baby parts. Arrowood’s had plenty of practice defending Planned Parenthood. Before working at U.S. News, Arrowood once did the same at Media Matters.
As the assistant editor for opinion at U.S. News, Arrowood fittingly inserted her opinion, in her piece headlined, “A Sham Hearing, in Three Excuses.” When House Republicans weren’t “interrupting and derogating” Richards during the hearing, Arrowood began, they “scrambled to offer explanations for the hearing on the women's health organization in the first place.”
She listed a few of those “excuses”: “sav[ing] taxpayer money,” “improving women's health care” and “punishing the organization over (false) allegations from edited videos purporting to expose the for-profit sale of fetal tissue.”
“Each justification,” she insisted, “collapses under scrutiny.”
For the “fiscal responsibility” argument, Arrowood retorted that ending Planned Parenthood federal subsidies would cost the government more money. She didn’t make note of the cost of lives.
Arrowood admitted that Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) referenced 13,000 health care centers available to women besides Planned Parenthood clinics – but only to attack his “faulty analysis.”
“First it assumes that women would seek these alternative services in the absence of Planned Parenthood,” she wrote, “and second he presumes that women have access to them at all.”
As she bashed the “infamous videos,” Arrowood pointed to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) when he asked Richards to specify which “statements” she apologized for in response to the first video – a question Richards couldn’t answer.
“The congressman repeatedly interrupted Richards’ attempt to explain that her initial apology came before the videos were determined to be edited,” Arrowood defended.
In all, the hearing was a “phony outrage” to Arrowood because “analysis after analysis has shown the videos were heavily edited” and “the unedited versions reveal only that Planned Parenthood is engaged in the legal donation of fetal tissue for scientific research.”
Arrowood didn’t accuse the unedited version of being edited, but she didn’t link to the latest forensic analysis of the videos either. Commissioned by Alliance Defending Freedom through Coalfire, a digital forensics firm that boasts experience in civil and criminal investigations, the analysis found that footage missing showed commuting, camera adjustments, bathroom breaks, meals and waiting.
Arrowood also didn’t acknowledge that the last video caught a Planned Parenthood executive on-camera as she commented on how “we have independent colleagues who generate a fair amount of income doing this” after she learns that the buyer offers around $100 per specimen.
Instead, Arrowood went back to the “hollow excuses” that “failed to cover up House Republicans' transparent motivation for investigating Planned Parenthood,” in other words, “showcasing their contempt for women's right to reproductive choice to prove their conservative credentials.”
Or maybe their contempt for aborted baby limbs torn apart with tweezers in the name of research.
“The irony is,” Arrowood said about House Republicans, “they're likely shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to 2016.” Pointing to an NBC News/WSJ poll saying 6 in 10 Americans oppose defunding Planned Parenthood, she concluded, “So it looks like the hearing's scrambling justifications, lies, and political exploitation might be all for naught.”
Leave it to Arrowood to translate a hearing in reaction to footage of aborted baby parts collected and sorted through as “Scrambling justifications, lies, and political exploitation.”
And for the record, NBC isn’t exactly unbiased. The network has aired only 13 seconds of the videos total during its network news shows.
But defending Planned Parenthood is a tradition for Arrowood, who similarly wrote on the abortion giant during her previous employment as an author at Media Matters, which monitors conservative media.
On Sept. 2, Arrowood wrote a Media Matters piece attacking conservative political commentator George Will. The headline for her story bashed, “George Will Accuses Planned Parenthood Of Running ‘Meat Markets’ With ‘Harvested’ Organs.”
In her story, Arrowood attacked the “deceptively edited videos” and called the “debunked notion that Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of fetal tissue” a “smear manufactured.”
Like with U.S. News and World Report, Arrowood brought up Planned Parenthood in regards to finances.
“Despite Will's declaration that taxes ‘finance barbarism,’” she insisted, “Planned Parenthood does not use any federal money for abortion procedures.”
Arrowood did not address fungible funding.
