Credulous Reporting of Deceptive Propaganda Made Planned Parenthood Attack Inevitable

Credulous Reporting of Deceptive Propaganda Made Planned Parenthood Attack Inevitable
by Jim Naureckas

Published on Monday, December 14, 2015
by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

The attack on Planned Parenthood was probably inevitable after the right saw how well the attack on ACORN was received.

ACORN, like Planned Parenthood, was at the top of the right’s list of most-hated organizations, though in ACORN’s case its chief sin was not helping women control their own bodies but rather helping poor people vote. ACORN was taken off the board by a series of deceptively edited, cunningly marketed hidden-camera videos, shot by right-wing prankster James O’Keefe (with Hannah Giles) and marketed by BigGovernment.com‘s Andrew Breitbart.

The story that the videos told about ACORN was repeated uncritically by elite reporters like the New York Times‘ Scott Shane (9/16/09), :

The undercover videos showed a scantily dressed young woman, Hannah Giles, posing as a prostitute, while a young man, James O’Keefe, played her pimp. They visited ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn and San Bernardino, Calif., candidly describing their illicit business and asking the advice of ACORN workers. Among other questions, they asked how to buy a house to use as a brothel employing underage girls from El Salvador…. In the footage made public—initially by a new website, BigGovernment.com—ACORN employees raised no objections to the criminal plans. Instead, they eagerly counseled the couple on how to hide their activities from the authorities, avoid taxes and make the brothel scheme work.

As became clear when the tapes (and accompanying transcripts) were examined by more skeptical eyes, O’Keefe and Giles did not go into ACORN’s offices in outlandish costumes. They presented O’Keefe as a concerned boyfriend trying to protect Giles from a fictional abusive pimp. The “advice” they got on how to evade taxes or set up brothels turned out to be the product of selective editing. (See FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10; Extra!, 4/10.) In one instance, an ACORN employee called police to report the pair’s suspicious visit (FAIR Blog,7/23/10).
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http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/12/14/credulous-reporting-deceptive-propaganda-made-planned-parenthood-attack-inevitable