The undercover hidden-camera interviews of Planned Parenthood have been dropped on the American public on a regular basis. About the only response from Planned Parenthood about the videos is that they were “heavily edited.” That response falls flat when you realize that the entire, uncut videos have been made available by the Center for Medical Progress.
The real editing of the videos (or should I say censoring) has actually been by the mainstream media. Here’s a good question. Have you seen any of these videos in the news? One of my guests from the Media Research Center estimated that ABC, CBS, and NBC spent four times as much time talking about the killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe as they did discussing the Planned Parenthood videos.
The combined total coverage of the videos for the three networks over these last few months has been 23 minutes. Brent Bozell digs deeper into those 23 minutes in a recent column. He found that the three networks “completely censored the actual video of the Planned Parenthood officials incriminating themselves.” He estimates that what you have seen from the actual videos was 73 seconds. CBS aired one minute of the footage. NBC devoted just 13 seconds to the videos. ABC never showed one second of the undercover videos.
This means that many Americans know nothing of Planned Parenthood officials talking about how they carefully crush the right parts of the baby in order to get the most body parts to sell. They have never seen people in a clinic sorting out those parts. They have never seen officials haggling over the price of whole babies or parts. They have never seen a tissue specialist admit that they sometimes take baby parts without the mother’s consent.
We shouldn’t be surprised then that a recent poll found that 53 percent of Americans had not heard of Planned Parenthood selling baby parts. And of the 47 percent that had heard something, 21 percent admitted they only heard “a little.” This is what happens when the news media censor a story.