Brent Bozell whines in his May 1 column:
The networks adore hidden-camera stories when the targets are conservative. Last September, they gave 88 minutes when Mother Jones reporting Mitt Romney was secretly recorded dismissing the “47 percent” that would never vote for him, which probably cost him the election.
When Mother Jones recently leaked video of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s team talking about the vulnerabilities of actress Ashley Judd as a Democratic opponent, ABC and NBC reported it in the evening and then again the next morning, with CBS just catching up in the morning. ABC’s Jim Avila said the Republican leader’s “private and politically embarrassing strategy session” showed a “cutthroat attack on a Hollywood opponent.”
Undercover videos by conservatives? Those don’t deserve the light of day. When Live Action exposed Planned Parenthood clinics in New Jersey and Virginia in 2011, with its clinic staff advising a “pimp” on how to evade the law with underage prostitutes, these three networks simply pretended the tapes didn’t exist. When James O’Keefe and his activists exposed the leftist pro-Obama group ACORN with hidden cameras in 2009, the networks waited for days to touch it and then aired just one solitary story (ABC, CBS) or three (NBC) once Congress moved to defund them. But Mother Jones is somehow a non-ideological outfit of journalistic integrity.
Bozell apparently doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the two. The Romney and McConnell videos simply involved secretly letting a recording device roll while the speakers said what they would have said whether a camera was there or not.
The ACORN videos were perpetrated by right-wing activists who used deceptive editing to portray ACORN workers in the worst light possible with the goal of destroying the organization. Indeed, lead perpetrator James O’Keefe agreed to pay one former ACORN employee $100,000 to settle a defamation lawsuit.
As far as the Lila Rose “pimp” sting went — which also involved deception and possibly entrapment and a right-wing activist motivated to destroy the organization she’s targeting — there was no there there because Rose covered up the fact that Planned Parenthood reported to the FBI a “potential multistate sex trafficking ring” after Rose’s visit.
The Romney and McConnell videos involve no deception; the Live Action and ACORN videos involved such deception to the point that what the selectively edited videos portray cannot be trusted, and further investigation tends to reveal that the facts are not what those videos portray.
But since Bozell wants those organizations destroyed, he doesn’t care about the facts — odd for someone who runs a “media research” organization.