Topic: Media Research Center
"There is nothing more predictable than networks burying negative news about Planned Parenthood," Paul Wilson writes in a May 30 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute article. And there's nothing more predictable than the MRC complaining that its pet right-wing causes aren't covered, no matter how specious or trivial.
Here's what Wilson is complaining about this time:
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.
But that's the truth -- this truly is a manufactured controversy, peddled by a discredited activist. Live Action's Lila Rose -- an associate of even more discredited right-wing activist James O'Keefe -- has been caught making a series of entrapment videos featuring fake "patients" with the explicit purpose of smearing Planned Parenthood to the extent of running it out of business. Rose is not interested in facts, she's only interested in destroying Planned Parenthood by whatever means necessary.
That sordid history, of course, is not mention by Wilson. Nor does Wilson mention the fact that Rose's current crusade is a hoax as well -- there simply is no evidence of any widespread effort to abort fetuses due to gender.
Wilson complained again in a May 31 CMI post that the broadcast TV networks (thus conveniently factoring out Fox News) are continuing to ignore the bogus Live Action-manufactured scandal, while they "went ballistic"when it was announced that the Susan G. Komen Foundation "was going to cease allocating funds to Planned Parenthood," but then later "caved to intense media pressure and reinstated funding for Planned Parenthood."
The MRC complained about coverage of the Komen at the time. It baselessly accused Planned Parenthood of making "vicious attacks" against the Komen foundation, while also grousing about the indisputable fact that Komen's cutting of funding to Planned Parenthood was the result of "bullying by the right" -- hiding the fact that the MRC was one of those bullies.
Wilson also disingenuously ranted that "a taxpayer-funded organization" was "assisting the practice of sex-selection abortion." In fact, there was no "sex-selection abortion" because the patient was fake, and no tax money to Planned Parenthood pays for abortion.
