The Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck uses a Dec. 7 post to smear Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak as a “pro-abortion lefty” spewing “insanity.” Why? Because she spoke the inconvenient truth that the Center for Medical Progress’ videos attacking Planned Parenthood were deceptively edited. Houck complained:
Dvorak chose not to look at her own employer or major TV outlets but instead attacked the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress and their undercover Planned Parenthood baby parts videos as being the lynchpin for a Colorado man to shoot up a local Planned Parenthood.
“What happened at Comet Ping Pong isn’t the first time we’ve seen real consequences of the doctored-news phenomenon. A year ago, a “gotcha” video — created by folks who lied, schemed and plotted to get a doctor to talk about the graphic details of her work while secretly being recorded — was pinging in the head of Robert Lewis Dear Jr. when he stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado,” Dvorak complained.
Dvorak continued with spin that somehow these videos weren’t true that couldn’t have been done any better than if Planned Parenthood wrote it themselves:Grandstanding congressmen fed him the “baby parts” line after they watched that heavily edited video of a Planned Parenthood executive talking about the donation of tissue from aborted fetuses. (They must’ve forgotten that fetal tissue has been used in important medical research since the 1930s and helped produce vaccines for polio, measles and mumps.)
The video was created under false pretenses and never would have met the standards of a legitimate news organization.
That faux investigation ended in hours of congressional hearings, a budget crisis for Planned Parenthood in many states and the deaths of those three people in Colorado.
Needless to say, Houck won’t admit that Dvorak is correct — the edited versions of the CMP videos make claims the full videos don’t support, and numerous state investigations of Planned Parenthood spurred by the CMP videos have found no wrongdoing regarding the issue of fetal tissue. The MRC’s seemingly official policy is to deny any deception on the CMP’s part.
Interestingly, though, Houck also declines to deny that Dear’s shooting spree was inspired by the CMP videos. Maybe he was too busy trying to deny that the videos were edited that he forgot to do that. The MRC has previously insisted Dear is “mentally unstable” to distance him from the CMP.
Houck concludes by complaining that “the left has once again shown that any worthwhile push to halt the spread of legitimately fake news can easily be stymied and backfire in an instant whenever liberals seize on the situation to promote it’s own self-serving agenda to attacking conservatives and right-leaning news sites (like this one) that truly do care about accuracy and take our jobs seriously to not spread falsehoods.”
This from a guy who won’t acknowledge the indisputable fact the CMP videos were misleadingly edited — and who is an employee of an organization that promoted a fake story from Fox News that Hillary Clinton’s indictment was imminent but never issued a full correction and retraction of it.
No, Curtis, you do not take your job seriously enough if you have no problem with perpetuating falsehoods that benefit right-wing arguments.