Topic: Media Research Center
For years, the Media Research Center has been hyping. and helping to raise money for the production of, a film about rogue abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell with the cooperation -- if not direct payments from -- producer Phelim McAleer. Now that the film is finally approaching an actual release, the MRC has cranked up the hype machine once more.
The latest love letter to McAleer and his film is an Aug. 15 piece in which Katie Yoder gushes over the film's trailer:
On Tuesday, The Hollywood Reporter (THR) broke the news that filmmakers had released a trailer for the anticipated Gosnell film, which stars big name actors.
In the moving video, actor Michael Beach’s character, district attorney Dan Molinari, warns those investigating Gosnell that, “When you get to the courthouse, you are going to be swarmed by reporters.”
But as they walk past empty rows of seats with signs reading “This row reserved for press,” actor Dean Cain, who plays a detective, asks, “Where is everybody?”
Yoder is in full PR mode, declaring that "the film isn’t just for pro-life audiences, as one scene in the trailer stresses."
Since she's doing press for the film instead of being even remotely objective, Yoder never gets around to asking McAleer an unanswered question from her last post on the film, despite getting access to an "exclusive statement" from him: How did McAleer settle the defamation lawsuit filed against him by the judge who presided at Gosnell's trial over his portrayal in McAleer's book on Gosnell and his presumed treatment in the film? That would seem to be an important, newsworthy issue, given that the lawsuit had stalled production on the movie and settling it allowed the film to move forward.
But Yoder isn't interested in reporting -- this is PR, remember? Thus, she concludes by gushing even further, "With big names involved, the film promises to be a success."
It's almost as if McAleer paid Yoder to say that.
Yoder's fawning promotion for McAleer's film -- which doesn't even open until October -- is doubly hypocritical given that a couple weeks earlier, her MRC colleague (well, intern) Peter Sifre was complaining that CNN was "devoting an entire segment to the promotion of an anti-Trump book that hasn’t even come out yet," huffing that "reporting of non-news stories should not be tolerated," adding: "[B]ecause the book has not come out yet, we don’t know what it contains. Thus, there is no news to report. This segment is nothing but book promotion of an obviously anti-Trump book that hasn’t even come out yet."
Peter Sifre, meet Katie Yoder.
