Planned Parenthood is in hot water due to videos showing its executives haggling over the prices of baby body parts, and the New York Times wants to make sure its readers know that Planned Parenthood is awesome and its detractors are icky.
Yesterday, the second in what is rumored to be a series of undercover sting videos against Planned Parenthood was released by the Center for Medical Progress. In the video, Mary Gatter — one of Planned Parenthood’s top medical offers — is seen negotiating over the price of livers from aborted babies. In one scene, she says she doesn’t want to be the first to name a price for the baby parts, because the first person to name a price in a negotiation always loses. In another, Gatter says that if the price offered is too low, she can just “bump it up.” Why? “I want a Lamborghini,” she says.
The video and news stories about it went viral almost immediately, with the topic shooting to the top of trending topic lists for both Twitter and Facebook. If you exclusively read the New York Times, however, you’d know nothing of the story. That’s because the paper, along with sites like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, refused to publish anything about the new video yesterday.
Trending on Facebook? Check.
Trending on Twitter? Check.
Completely missing from BuzzFeed? You know it. pic.twitter.com/Y5h7WY5jnK
Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 22, 2015
What's amazing about this is HuffPo published a story yesterday wherein @PPact warns that new videos are coming out pic.twitter.com/rAlgrAFBUH
Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 21, 2015
Your search – lamborghini – did not match any documents." All the news that's fit to bury, right, @nytimes? pic.twitter.com/6lisCmuLUz
Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 21, 2015
This morning, however, the New York Times finally saw fit to address the story. Well, kind of. Instead of providing a straightforward accounting of what happens in the video of Gatter and her colleagues discussing the purchase and sale of human organs over a meal in a noisy restaurant, the New York Times published a 1,500-word expose on…the group that produced the videos.
To her credit, Jackie Calmes, the author of the New York Times report, did reference in the second paragraph the haggling over baby body parts clearly shown in the video. To her discredit, Calmes’ reference was just used as an excuse to print Planned Parenthood’s defense that the negotiation over the price of aborted baby body parts prices was totally legal:
On Tuesday, for a second time in two weeks, a video appeared online showing a Planned Parenthood official in California discussing over lunch the price of providing fetal parts to a man and woman who are never shown on camera, but who are posing as buyers from a firm that procures tissue for medical researchers. Once again, Planned Parenthood condemned the scam for deceptively characterizing its handling fees to cover expenses, which are legal, as illegal profiteering.
The repetition of the nonsense defense from Planned Parenthood is remarkable, because it directly contradicts the conversation that happens in the video. A person who only wants to be reimbursed for the costs of a good or procedure does not need to haggle. She does not need to worry about throwing out the first figure for fear of losing money. She doesn’t need to say that she can just “bump up” the price if it’s too low so she can eventually buy herself a Lamborghini. (For some reason, the word “Lamborghini” is never mentioned in the New York Times story about the video.)
A person who cares only about reimbursement will clearly disclose the costs that must be covered and leave it at that. No negotiation is necessary. Either the buyer agrees to cover the costs, or he doesn’t. That’s it.
But that’s not what happened in the video, which may explain why the New York Times goes to great pains to avoid telling its readers what actually happened in the video. In fact, not only does Jackie Calmes never mention the Lamborghini remark in her piece, she doesn’t quote a single remark from the entire hour-plus conversation. Nor does she even mention the name of the Planned Parenthood official captured in the video.
In a story ostensibly about a Planned Parenthood executive playing hardball over aborted baby organ prices, the New York Times never mentioned the executive’s name and never quoted a single remark she made. Instead, the newspaper quickly repeated a nonsense claim from Planned Parenthood’s legal team and then quickly transitioned to an attack on the group that produced the videos. Then, with that work out of the way, the New York Times editorial board took over, using its paper’s “news” story as cover:
The video attacking Planned Parenthood is a fraudulent attempt to make legal, voluntary services look nefarious. http://t.co/O3Sd3WI6bs
NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) July 22, 2015
“Legal.” “Voluntary.”
Based on the clear conversation in the video, which apparently nobody at the New York Times has even viewed judging by its coverage, both those words — legal and voluntary — appear to have zero basis in fact.
In one portion of the video, Gatter explicitly says that she’s willing to ask one of her organization’s abortionists if he’ll ignore a “violation of patient protocol” in order to alter the abortion procedure without the patient’s explicit consent. The alteration, Gatter says, is necessary to increase the probability of harvesting an organ she can later sell. Gatter then waves away the issue of violating patient protocol by saying it’s a “specious little argument” against using a different abortion procedure than the one agreed to by the patient.
If the New York Times wishes to evangelize on behalf of Moloch in its editorial pages, that’s its prerogative. But there’s no excuse for whitewashing facts on the news pages when your attempt enforce a blackout on the story eventually crumbles. The New York Times tipped its hand when it pretended to write a story about the video without ever mentioning a single remark from the entire hour-long conversation it captured. It tipped its hand when it refused to even name the abortionist who tried to play hardball over the price she’d be willing to pay for body parts ripped from a healthy, viable unborn baby.
The New York Times masthead proudly proclaims that it publishes “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” but in practice, the organization is more than happy to bury all the news that’s fit to abort.
