There is nothing more predictable than networks burying negative news about Planned Parenthood.
Pro-life organization Live Action recently came out with a disturbing video showing a Planned Parenthood staffer in Texas assisting a Live Action actor to obtain a sex-selection abortion. That practice is where a fetus is aborted if the child is discovered to be of a certain gender (usually female). The broadcast outlets have completely ignored the controversy: ABC, CBS, and NBC have not devoted a single second of their May 29 evening broadcasts and May 30 morning broadcasts to coverage of the recent Live Action videos.
Left-wing outlets have gone into damage control, spinning the Live Action sting as a manufactured controversy. Jezebel called it a “terribly dumb sting operation,” and said “statistics do not indicate that the U.S. has a problem with sex selection abortions.” Think Progress claims Planned Parenthood quickly fired the employee responsible.
However, the liberal Huffington Post interviewed a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman who asserted that “no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions.” In other words, Planned Parenthood will provide abortions for any reason, including for the purposes of eliminating a child of the “wrong” gender.
The video comes as the House plans to vote on a bill prohibiting sex-selection abortion in the United States. Sex-selection abortion is unpopular; 77% of Americans oppose sex-selection abortion in the U.S., according to a recent poll by the Lozier Institute (a research arm of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List).
On May 29, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly did a segment with Lila Rose, the head of Live Action, on the findings in the video. Rose explained the shocking nature of Live Action’s findings: “If you watch the full tape, they go on for minutes. I mean, the whole counseling session’s fifteen minutes. They go on about the different ways to determine gender, the different ways to select for abortion, the ways to kill a little girl.”
But such findings were not newsworthy, according to the networks.
The Culture and Media Institute has documented how the broadcast networks buried previous Planned Parenthood-related scandals. It took CBS a week to report on the most spectacular of the scandals, the sex trafficking scandal. ABC took over 2 weeks to report on the story, and NBC never reported on it at all. Other scandals, such as Planned Parenthood getting caught falsely claiming that they provided mammograms, were never reported on by the networks.
If the media’s past is any guide, this Live Action video will be buried as well.
