“You lie so much you believe yourself,” Metallica’s James Hetfield growls in 1991’s Holier Than Thou.
That quote is especially relevant this week following the Washington Post’s knee-jerk decision to publish pro-Planned Parenthood agitprop in response to the sudden removal of the group’s president, Leana Wen.
“Planned Parenthood ousts leader after less than a year,” reads the headline to the Post’s first major story on Wen’s short-lived tenure as president.
“The president of Planned Parenthood was forced out of her job Tuesday in a dispute over the direction of the nation’s largest women’s reproductive rights organization amid growing political and legal challenges to abortion,” the article begins.
The use of the euphemism “reproductive rights” is a clear giveaway that the story, which carries three separate bylines, is interested more in protecting the reputation of the nation’s largest provider of abortion than it is informing its readers. And, boy, does the Post deliver. The paper’s initial report on Wen’s untimely termination contained two major lies.
The first was the claim that the supposed women’s health organization performs mammograms. The authors apparently do not read their own newspaper — the Post’s own Michelle Ye Hee Lee thoroughly debunked this falsehood in 2015. The paper has since stealth-edited its story on Wen’s unplanned removal to cut all mentions of “mammograms.” There is no editor’s note explaining the change.
The second big lie pushed this week by the Post was that a series of undercover videos featuring Planned Parenthood executives discussing compensation for the donation of organs salvaged from the remains of aborted children were “heavily edited.” The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had to investigate this claim in order to adjudicate an issue in a recent court case. Its investigators affirmed the Texas Office of Inspector General and its chief medical officer’s findings that the video was “authentic and not deceptively edited.” The 5th Circuit also found that Planned Parenthood had indeed, at a minimum, “violated federal standards regarding fetal tissue research and standards of medical ethics by allowing doctors to alter abortion procedures to retrieve tissue for research purposes or allowing the researchers themselves to perform the procedures.”
It is also worth noting that the Center for Medical Progress produced multiple highlight reels featuring multiple conversations with multiple Planned Parenthood executives and released all of its uncut, raw footage. To this day, neither Planned Parenthood nor its supporters can say what exculpatory content was “selectively edited” from the videos. The nation’s premier provider of abortions is fortunate to have journalists and publications like the Post, which will parrot this “heavily edited” line by default even after it has been meticulously debunked and even though there was no evidence of it in the first place beyond Planned Parenthood officials’ self-serving say-so.
Then again, we should not be surprised that the sort of people who are so lazy that they would also repeat the Planned Parenthood mammogram lie would also repeat the “heavily edited” falsehood.