LAT Minimizes Child Abuse, More Bothered By 'Conservatives' Exposing It


On Sunday (4/26/09), the Los Angeles Times finally got around to looking into the issue of Planned Parenthood workers caught on hidden camera appearing to violate the law. Workers at numerous clinics around the country appear to be illegally advising girls they believe to be underage to conceal statutory rape.

The Times profiled the hero of these undercover busts, Lila Rose, a 20-year-old student at UCLA ("Antiabortion movement gets a new-media twist"). Rose's pro-life mission that has been conducting these hidden-camera operations is called Live Action.

Yet, rather than directing any real outrage at Planned Parenthood for concealing the despicable crimes of statutory rape and child abuse, the Times seemed more perturbed at the "conservative" personalities behind Rose and her efforts. From the article:

  • Last month, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to suspend a grant worth nearly $300,000 to Planned Parenthood that was earmarked for sex education, not abortions. A conservative Tustin businessman raised the issue with Supervisor John Moorlach after meeting Rose and seeing her videos.
  • "They are on the lookout for me," [Rose] told an audience of conservative Christian activists at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit in Washington in September.
  • David French, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund ... appeared at [Rose's] side during an interview with conservative TV talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. She also receives guidance from CRC Public Relations, a Washington-area firm that represents conservative clients and had a hand in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that targeted Democrat John F. Kerry during the 2004 presidential race.
  • Between 2006 and 2008, Rose attended four workshops at the Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based educational foundation that teaches conservatives how to polish their communication skills.
  • In fall 2006, when she was a UCLA freshman, [Rose] and fellow conservative activist James O'Keefe came up with the idea to infiltrate clinics.

The Times also went out of their way to omit a lot of information that would be unflattering to Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. For example, from the article:

Rose, by e-mail, and O'Keefe, in a phone interview, said they were inspired by the work of Mark Crutcher, a Texas antiabortion activist who in 2002 taped fake calls to hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics around the country featuring women posing as pregnant minors.

What the Times failed to tell their readers is that Crutcher's investigation found that a whopping 91% of the abortion businesses did not comply with child abuse reporting laws(!).

The Times also wrote,

In May 2007, Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles accused Rose of breaking state privacy laws when she secretly taped her interactions. It demanded she remove the videos from her website, which she did, though they are still easily found on YouTube. (Arizona, Indiana and Tennessee, where she went next, have less restrictive privacy laws.)

The Times didn't bother to inform their readers that a Planned Parenthood worker is heard on the tape telling a girl that she believes to be 15, "You could say 16…well, just figure out a birth date that works. And I don’t know anything." Such advice appears to be a clear violation of California's penal codes regarding the reporting of child abuse.

And as we reported at the time, the Los Angeles Times did not publish a single article about this outrage, even though it happened right in their backyard.

Rather than shine some light on the actions by Planned Parenthood workers that seem so illegal, the Times appeared more concerned about Rose and her operations.

For this story, Rose would answer questions only by e-mail. When contacted in December, she agreed to meet a reporter the next day but canceled, citing schoolwork, and refused to reschedule. She was subsequently advised by a publicist to communicate only in writing.

She did not answer a question about who funds her work, saying only that she operates "on a very low budget" and uses "mostly student volunteers." Federal tax records for Live Action Films, created in 2008, are not yet available.

The Times wants their readers to forget about Planned Parenthood concealing statutory rape and child abuse. They'd rather try to marginalize Rose and shine light on Live Action's "federal tax records." Gee. What about Planned Parenthood's tax records?!

By the way, the author of the Times' awful piece is staffer Robin Abcarian, who also penned an October 2008 hit piece on Sarah Palin (title: "Sarah Palin's college years left no lasting impression").

(See also Matthew Balan's 4/27/09 NB post regarding this issue and US News' Bonnie Erbe. My take: It seems Erbe is more outraged at the crime of "trespassing" and so-called "fraud" than concealing child rape. If these were Catholic bishops or priests on these tapes concealing this awful crime, would it matter to Erbe, the Los Angeles Times, or anyone in the media who made the tape or what their agenda is? Of course not. Double ... standard.)

 

—Dave Pierre is the creator of TheMediaReport.com and a contributor to NewsBusters.


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hey Dave.. solid

I caught the spot on O'Reilly last week.. and my very first thought I formulated at the end of the show, other than, "well, that's about the total coverage that will receive," was that I wondered how many days it would take the LA Times to figure out how to marginalize the the young brave gal doing the undercover work. 

I'd pat myself on the back for the dead ringer prediction, but one doesn't even have to be very smart to see it coming.

Thanks for the post. (;~> gary 

 

I too heard this and I also

I too heard this and I also thank you Dave.

It is really sad the silence in so many areas regarding all of this.

I am disgusted about Sebelius getting confirmed today with nine 'R' voting for her as Planned Parenthood smiles wide, along with George Tiller the Baby Killer.

Doubling down on stupid is not a particularly good idea. ~Andrew Breitbart

Y'all clearly don't

Y'all clearly don't understand the Planned Parenthood Ethos: Anything that facilitates sexual activity is good (even if it's facilitating child abuse and statutory rape). Anything that inhibits sexual activity is bad (even if the person whose sexual activity is being inhibited is a pedophile).

 And considering that one of Planned Parenthood's abortionists, George Kabacy, was arrested for possession and distribution of child porn that's deplorable even by child porn standards, well, say no more. 

http://realchoice.0catch.com/library/weekly/aa120507a.htm 

 (And imagine how the MSM would have pounced on the story if a doctor who worked at a prolife pregnancy center had pleaded guilty to similar charges!) 

They also think the only good baby is a dead baby

This isn't directed at you, Granny, but I think we can do away with diplomatic words like "seem" and "appear" when dealing with these fanatics. They don't "seem" not to care about pedophilia and/or statutory rape. They absolutely don't care about pedophilia and/or statutory rape. They don't "appear" to be misleading girls and coaching them to lie, they absolutely are misleading girls and coaching them to lie. No one who knows anything at all about Sanger and company could possibly think otherwise. 

The LA Times Feels It Must Protect the Sacrament of Abortion.

In their mind, every female must undergo this liberal 'right' of 'passage'. I honestly believe that if a toddler came in they would provide their "medical services".

What Else To Expect?

Abortion absolutists will tolerate anything in order to preserve the evil right to kill the unborn and even the newly born if the abortion attempt fails inside the womb.  So yes, they will always be more concerned with those that expose their evil deeds, then their evil deeds.

Not Surprising

Considering that the LAT is a progressive, statist organ of the left, it is not surprising that they are interested in marginalizing Rose,  who is going after one of their sacred icons.  And Planned Parenthood was the child of Margaret Sanger, a true heroine of all true progressives and statists. 

Sanger's reasons for advocating birth control stemmed, in part, from her views on race and heredity. She was a devoted eugenicist who advocated forced sterilization -- of the poor and the mentally deficient, in particular, who she believed were likely to produce "subnormal" offspring -- for the purpose of improving society's overall gene pool. Examples of her ideas on selective breeding are found throughout her columns and newsletters. For instance, she wrote:

"It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. Herein lies the key of civilization. For upon the foundation of an enlightened and voluntary motherhood shall a future civilization emerge."

"The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind," Sanger elaborated.

The eugenic theme figured prominently in Sanger's Birth Control Review, wherein she published such articles as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics" (June 1920); "The Eugenic Conscience" (February 1921); "The Purpose of Eugenics" (December 1924); "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics" (July 1925); "Birth Control: The True Eugenics" (August 1928); and many others.

At a March 1925 international birth-control event in New York City, Sanger advocated -- for the "salvation of American civilization" -- the sterilization of those "unfit" to procreate. In addition, she condemned the "irresponsible and reckless" rates of procreation among those "whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers." She was referring specifically to Catholics who rejected the use of contraception. "There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people," she added, "that the procreation of this group should be stopped."

In her quest to engineer a civilization devoid of "subnormal children," Sanger often worked jointly with groups and individuals whose goals vis a vis eugenics overlapped with her own, even if their larger agendas differed from hers. In 1926, for instance, she presented a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. In September 1930 she invited Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer (whose ideas were cited by the Nazis to legitimize the extermination of Jews) to meet with her at her home.

Sanger's commitment to eugenic "sexual science" dovetailed seamlessly with her Marxist vision. While she had been heartened by the success of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, she doubted that a revolution for a new communist order in the U.S. could be carried out by a proletariat class of limited intellectual capacity. Thus she sought to elevate the quality of the overall gene pool by means of eugenics. "In pointing out the limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian opinion," Sanger wrote in The Pivot of Civilization, "my purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of Socialists aiming to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me to be the greatest and most neglected truth of our day: unless sexual science is incorporated … and the pivotal importance of birth control is recognized in any program of reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization are foredoomed to failure."

In January 1939 two of Sanger's organizations, the Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League (ABCL), merged to form the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA).

At this point, Sanger turned her attention specifically to the reproductive practices of black Americans. She selected former ABCL director Clarence J. Gamble (of the Procter and Gamble company) to become BCFA's southern regional director. That November, Gamble drew up a memorandum titled "Suggestion for Negro Project," whose ultimate aim was to decrease the black birth rate significantly. Anticipating that black leaders would be suspicious of anyone exhorting African Americans to have fewer children, Gamble suggested that BCFA place black leaders in high positions within the organization, so as to give the appearance that they were in charge of the group's agendas. BCFA presented birth control as a vehicle for the upward economic mobility of blacks.

More from Jonah Goldberg, who reveals that Sanger, for all her eugenicist views, and her legacy of abortion clinics dotting the land, was anti-abortion!:

Under the banner of “reproductive freedom,” Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the “positive” eugenicists, deriding it as mere “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, The Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, The Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rüdin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.” When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934, she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit...no permit shall be valid for more than one child.”47 But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

...In 1939 Sanger created the above-mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes...is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

It is possible that Sanger didn’t really want to “exterminate” the Negro population so much as merely limit its growth. Still, many in the black community saw it that way and remained rightly suspicious of the Progressives’ motives. It wasn’t difficult to see that middle-class whites who consistently spoke of “race suicide” at the hands of dark, subhuman savages might not have the best interests of blacks in mind. This skepticism persisted within the black community for decades. Someone who saw the relationship between abortion and race from a less trusting perspective telegrammed Congress in 1977 to tell them that abortion amounted to “genocide against the black race.” And he added, in block letters, “AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS.” This was Jesse Jackson, who changed his position when he decided to seek the Democratic nomination.

...The issue here is not the explicit intent of liberals or the rationalizations they invoke to deceive themselves about the nature of abortion. Rather, it is to illustrate that even when motives and arguments change, the substance of the policy remains in its effects. After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as “barbaric” and called abortionists “bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names.” Abortion resulted in “an outrageous slaughter” and “the killing of babies,” which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.

God bless Lila Rose.

"The future is not set.  There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."

michaelyon-online.com

They're not bothered by

They're not bothered by infanticide, why should they be bothered by child rape?

Yet they wonder

Yet the LATimes wonders why it's circulation has fallen 20% over the last 4 years.  It's partly because of the blatantly biased and politically one-sided journalism as demonstrated in this article.

Truth is most people no longer trust the LATimes.