When you're planning to do a James O'Keefe-style video takedown of Planned Parenthood, you need to do two things: hope they don't call the cops, and have your videos withstand media scrutiny. Well, fail and fail.
If you look of the failures of the Breitbart gang, you find a trail of broken scoops. There was the highly edited Acorn videos (with fake pimp costume playcards), the highly edited Shirley Sherrod video, Landrieugate, the Census non-story, Boatgate, the New Jersey education non-story, the One United where-even-is-the-promised-video? non-story, and now the Planned Parenthood mess. Each of these stories starts with a plan to distort the truth way beyond the discoveries usually associated with accredited reporting. And because there is too much riding on an attempt to make a story based on a half-assed predetermined headline, when push comes to shove they cheat to get out a finished product.
Just as all the above plans failed, the Planned Parenthood caper will fail, too—it was foiled by the very people they were trying to smear. Planned Parenthood notified the FBI that there were reports at clinics across the country of someone asking for services for an underaged prostitution ring. This forced Live Action to release videos perhaps faster than they wanted (and maybe before they could get some more fake editing done). Most of what has been revealed in videos released by Live Action so far just show workers giving advice mirroring what services are currently already legal, and the person who didn't adhere to Planned Parenthood's standards has been fired. Ironically, Planned Parenthood considers information related to the visits of the hoaxsters to be protected by medical privacy laws.
So now Jeremy Schulman at Media Matters has found that audio in one of the videos has been altered. This makes sense if you consider that in the past the Breitbart team were caught editing video. So the video counter runs, uninterrupted. But they do not show the face of the woman they are trying to smear, so there's no video to corroborate the order in which the conversation flowed. Live Action moved audio from one part of the conversation to another. The gist is that they are insinuating that she tells the "pimp" how to get around getting an underage prostitute an abortion without parental consent, when actually it was two separate conversations.
In the past few weeks we have seen a renewed attack on a woman's reproductive rights by a group of people who are in the minority in this country. Because they do not have the power to overthrow this right by legal means, they choose to attack those who legally provide or receive services. They have demonized providers and perhaps emboldened the terrorists who have acted: Eric Rudolph, Scott Roeder, Paul Hill. They have recently tried—and failed— to redefine what rape is, or compared incestual rape to lemonade, of all things. And organizations like Live Action try to create propaganda to turn the public will.
No one likes abortion. But going through this devious way to distort the truth, when we should be having an honest conversation on the realities of American life, is abhorrent. While Live Action is going around masquerading as sex traffickers to shut down Planned Parenthood, real child sex traffickers are descending on Dallas for this Sunday's Superbowl. And how does the NFL react to that? By refusing to acknowledge it.
Pro-lifers famously question when a fetus becomes a human being. After that, they don't seem to care.
Update:
Thanks for the recs.
Gawker's John Cook has a piece on the controversy, including information on how legal everything is.