Planned Parenthood closely controlled media access to its press conference yesterday, as it announced a lawsuit against David Daleiden and his colleagues at the Center for Medical Progress for exposing Planned Parenthood’s baby-parts business.
Only lapdog press was allowed, absolutely no critics.
An announcement blasted out yesterday morning asked journalists to apply for participation in the phone conference. Journalists were asked to submit their name and the name of their news outlet.
Both Susan Berry and this reporter applied for Breitbart News, the 35th largest new-site in the world, according to Alexa.com, that recently passed a billion page views over the past year and ranked in the top ten of the Facebook list of responsive sites. Neither were allowed into the press conference.
It is likely that Breitbart ran as many or more stories about the baby-parts scandal than any other news outlet in the world, literally dozens of stories, perhaps a few hundred, beginning when the story broke last summer. And the responses among our readers were truly amazing.
The first story Breitbart published when the tapes first broke garnered 32,000 Facebook shares and the audience built from there.
One would think that a billion-dollar-a-year organization with massive professional PR help, not to mention pricey lawyers would not be afraid of talking to critics.
The coverage of their suit received the expected fawning coverage straight from Planned Parenthood talking points. CNN referred to the tapes as “heavily edited.” Time Magazine referred to the tapes as “deceptive edited.” Reuters connected the videos to the hostage situation in Colorado Springs. The Washington Post repeated Planned Parenthood’s charge of “heavy editing.”
What none of these outlets reported is that two forensic studies — one initiated by Planned Parenthood and conducted by Democratic opposition research personnel and another commissioned by Daleiden and carried out by a forensic consulting group for Fortune 500 companies — concluded that the edits in the tapes were for bathroom breaks and other non-nefarious reasons.
Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse
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