By DEXTER DUGGAN
Let’s walk in to The New York Times, or Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times, or any other major — and likely very pro-abortion — newspaper.
Who are those folks over there? All the copy editors. And there? The section editors. And there? The managing editor. There? Two deputy editors. And next to them? The editor.
Editing seems to be a pretty important job here — selecting and slapping into shape the local, national, and international events for each day’s paper and website.
What? They don’t publish every single word spoken at the county and federal courthouses, the airport control towers, the downtown and suburban city councils, the state capitol, the national capitol, the foreign embassies, everyone’s neighborhood, and everywhere else?
If they did, one issue of a daily paper might be two million pages thick. The important requirement is that the news selection and editing fairly represent at least the core of what occurred.
If the defendant at criminal trial jumps up late in the afternoon and says, “I’m guilty! I murdered him!”, that becomes the top of the news story, even if 13,000 other words were spoken in court that day.
What would be unfair is if the defendant’s courtroom confession is omitted from the story because he’s the publisher’s pal.
It’s more than remarkable that the dominant pro-abortion media have made into a mantra that the damning Planned Parenthood abortion videos released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) are “edited” or “highly edited.”
The implication is intended to be that the videos are unfairly edited, but nothing could be further from the truth. The CMP also makes freely available the unedited videos and transcripts for anyone who has the time for a longer examination taking hours, instead of a summary. How many newspapers offer such extensive links to all that they report?
Where the unfair editing is going on is at doggedly pro-abortion media agencies that don’t want a fair presentation — because news consumers would learn more and react adversely to, and maybe try to impair, the permissive pro-abortion agenda.
Oh yes, there’s plenty of unfair editing regarding the CMP videos. It’s how hostile daily media’s stories misreport, twist, minimize, or outright ignore.
If these biased media could make a persuasive, thorough demonstration the CMP videos are frauds and fabrications, as Planned Parenthood says, they’d do so with yelps of joy. They can’t, so they mutter about “editing” and mute the subject.
However, U.S. congressional investigators are following the scent, the stench coming from Planned Parenthood’s putrid hallways. Behind each door down the hall, something worse emerges.
The video released August 12, “Inside the Planned Parenthood Supply Site,” was the sixth brought before the public since the series began in mid-July.
A technician for the procurement company StemExpress, Holly O’Donnell, tells CMP investigators that her co-workers would start planning to obtain what baby-body material they wanted even before a pregnant mother decided whether to have an abortion at Planned Parenthood.
Or they might even take the baby parts if the mother didn’t consent to “donate,” in actuality stealing what they wanted, O’Donnell says.
Her supervisors said that approaching mothers to try to obtain “donations” is “not an option, it’s a demand.”
As for consent, former Texas Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson told the August 10 Daily Signal website that her abortuary was careful to avoid factual language when seeking mothers’ “donations.” The clinic wanted an arm or a leg or specific organs, but saying so would undesirably “personalize” the unborn baby, so the clinic only requested permission to obtain “tissue.”
An August 12 CMP news release said: “According to O’Donnell, Planned Parenthood gave StemExpress workers access to patient records and schedules so that the harvesting company could plan for the days when patient ‘supply’ would be greatest.
“ ‘They give you a sheet, and it’s everybody for that day, who’s coming in for an ultrasound, who’s coming in for an abortion, medical or a late-term abortion,’ O’Donnell explains. Even patients just seeking a pregnancy test at Planned Parenthood were considered part of the supply: ‘Pregnancy tests are potential pregnancies, therefore potential specimens. So it’s just taking advantage of the opportunities’,” the news release said.
The release also said: “StemExpress supervisors instructed O’Donnell about approaching pregnant women at Planned Parenthood for fetal-tissue ‘donations.’ O’Donnell says the StemExpress techs…sometimes harvested fetal parts without obtaining consent from the patients: ‘If there was a higher gestation [baby], and the technicians needed it, there were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know’.”
O’Donnell said one clinic abortionist in his 70s would get mad if there was an interruption in a steady stream of patients, and worked “viciously fast,” sometimes damaging the fetal material the procurers wanted.
An August 12 story in the Washington Examiner reported: “‘The women I worked for were cold, they didn’t care, they just wanted their money,’ O’Donnell says. ‘They didn’t care girls were throwing up in a trash can, crying’.”
O’Donnell was aware that a woman declined to consent, but O’Donnell saw another staffer having made the desired collection anyway. When asked what she’d said to obtain it, O’Donnell says she replied, “Nothing.”
StemExpress disavowed any wrongdoing, The Daily Signal website reported August 12, saying the procurement company “unequivocally denies the allegations made by Holly O’Donnell and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), reaffirming that it has never obtained blood or tissue samples from a patient without first obtaining consent.
“Ensuring that patients have provided consent for blood or tissue donation to support medical research, education, or treatments is a threshold issue that is non-negotiable for StemExpress. Like all of their previous material, today’s video by CMP is deceptively edited and falsely worded to suggest impropriety or illegality where none exists,” the company said.
However, the company began fighting in Los Angeles Superior Court to block the release of one video made in a restaurant May 22 by CMP investigators, featuring StemExpress leadership.
Criminal Penalties
Southern California attorney Charles LiMandri, a co-counsel for the pro-life defendants, showed The Wanderer a copy of paperwork that his office prepared, arguing that if the plaintiffs are harmed by the video, it won’t be due to deceptive editing. “Rather, any harm will result from plaintiffs’ own incriminating words and illegal actions.”
In his argument, LiMandri says: “Plaintiffs have sought not only to enjoin the release of an edited video but also the release of the entire video because they fear that the public awareness of what they are actually doing would be harmful to their business and potentially subject them to criminal penalties. . . . Nor is the suppression of evidence to avoid potential criminal prosecution a proper basis to restrain speech.”
However, LiMandri told The Wanderer on August 12 that the procurement company hadn’t said that CMP leader David Daleiden should be forbidden to speak about what was said at the restaurant.
In a late-July interview with CNN, Daleiden said StemExpress “admitted that they sometimes get fully intact fetuses shipped to their laboratory from the abortion clinics they work with, and that could be prima facie evidence of born-alive infants. And so that’s why they’re trying to suppress that videotape and they’re very scared of it.”
Asked by The Wanderer if he knew how many intact infants were received, LiMandri replied, “I don’t know that, I’m sorry, but I understand they’re multiple.”
The defendants are to argue in Los Angeles Superior Court on October 1 to end this proceeding, he said.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress