With the over-the-top headline: “Why Is Live Action Doctoring Its Planned Parenthood Audio?“, Media Matters of America has offered its readers (all the content producers at MSNBC and network news) a pitiful story meant to plant the idea that the devastatingly effective investigative videos produced by Live Action are in some way bogus.  But, in turn, the “gotcha” that MMFA purports to have discovered actually undermines their own spin and talking points they have been peddling the last couple of days.  It also serves to bolster Live Action’s credibility, not diminish it.  Nice work, Senior Fellows.

First, let’s follow the timeline on this:

When the videos first hit on Tuesday showing Live Action’s undercover investigation of a New Jersey Planned Parenthood office, Media Matters response was that Planned Parenthood had done nothing wrong.  Media Matters even went so far as to call the videos “Hoax Videos.”  They held on to that story for the entire day, until Planned Parenthood undermined it just a bit by firing the employee who was featured in the video.   If Media Matters was trying to help Planned Parenthood, they did a lousy job.  Because now, thanks to them, the sacked employee has some pretty good evidence for her wrongful termination lawsuit.  After all, it was widely reported that the Live Action videos showed no wrong-doing, so why was she fired? (more…)

On March 5, in a kicking-and-screaming, last-ditch effort to save her organization, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis wrote in BeyondChron.org of the “right-wing attacks” on ACORN by “undercover right-wing racist James O’Keefe,” repeating a Greatest Hits compilation of factually-defunct angles left has desperately drummed into the mainstream for the past five months, from the race angle to the doctored-videos angle.

On March 4, Stephen Colbert staked these angles to the pop culture turf in light of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s recent report that the undercover tapes were “heavily edited,” producing a satirically-edited interview with Sean Hannity to deride James’ allged “deceptive editing.”  No mention that Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, was endorsed by the ACORN-related Working Families Party during his recent bid for re-election. (Find the unedited audio and full transcripts here.)

And my recent bar brawl with Tommy Christopher — a Mediaite blogger who has been promoting the notion that James O’Keefe’s ACORN investigation was racially motivated — in Washington D.C. during CPAC, confirms my assessment of the utter desperation of O’Keefe’s critics.

Ironically, with no tangible evidence that O’Keefe’s videos were, in fact, “heavily edited,” the left has been literally heavily editing their attack plan against him – correcting, updating, and revising their angles of assault in order to catch up with the facts. (more…)