CNN enticed viewers with a special program promising “the real story behind those Planned Parenthood videos.” Those Planned Parenthood videos which have almost single-handedly prompted multiple federal and state-level investigations into the nation’s largest perpetrator of abortions (over three hundred thousand per year, to be exact). Those videos which have blown the tightly-sealed lid off of Planned Parenthood’s wholesale of the dead bodies of those aborted babies. Those videos which may, one day in the not-too-distant future, be credited as the beginning of the end of the century-old Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Those videos.
The implication of CNN’s angle – that they had investigated “the real story” – is that those videos had left something out, or told a fake story, or led people to misguided conclusions about Planned Parenthood. Indeed, the abortion lobby’s incessant claim is that the videos have been “deceptively edited!” in spite of a Planned Parenthood-commissioned forensics report suggesting otherwise, and a Coalfire forensics report affirming unequivocally that the video was not tarnished by deceptive editing.
Yet, CNN was happy to play along with the Planned Parenthood agenda, and in their own highly-edited report, attempted to discredit the damning videos. They did this not by refuting the actual footage that catches Planned Parenthood entangled in multiple illegal enterprises (whether their journalists even did due diligence in watching the full footage of all the videos is unclear), but rather by attempting to paint CMP leader David Daleiden as a dishonest radical with an agenda.
The “problem” CNN found with Daleiden’s videos? That he used imagery to illustrate points described by former StemExpress employee Holly O’Donnell. Specifically, CMP included images of a baby who was stillborn and video of a live baby delivered in a late-term live-birth abortion. The video, Daleiden explains, comes from the Center for Bioethical Reform, a highly-regarded Pro-Life organization that archives abortion imagery and raises awareness of the gruesome reality of abortion through these images.
CNN faulted Daleiden with making “sloppy edits” because he used images of babies who were not the actual children O’Donnell witnessed (of whom there is presumably no photographic record). CNN refers to these images as “pictures that came out of nowhere that were dropped in.” Daleiden explained that the images were of preborn children of the same gestational age which were used to illustrate the descriptions provided by O’Donnell. Why CNN took issue with this particular point is unclear, given that abortionists themselves make no attempt to argue that the images are accurate depictions of the babies they abort every day.
Maybe when CNN couldn’t find an actual problem with the CMP videos, they decided to fabricate one rather than scrap their agenda-driven search-and-destroy mission against the video evidence of the Center for Medical Progress. Speaking of agenda-driven, Daleiden utterly decimated the slanted attacks of CNN correspondent Chris Cuomo in an interview following the “real story” special. The following exchange puts to rest the ridiculous argument that the summary videos do an injustice to Planned Parenthood’s actual operations:
Cuomo: “Do you believe [editing of the summary videos]changes the context of what the conversations were?”
Daleiden: “No, not at all… When you’re talking about using ultrasound guidance to know where to put your forceps on a late-term fetus in order to harvest the brain or harvest the lung or harvest the heart, there’s no context in which those statements become inoffensive or acceptable to most people.”
