Bill O’Reilly Fumes Over Network News Ignoring Planned Parenthood Abortion Controversy
Bill O’Reilly began his show on Thursday evening talking about the latest Planned Parenthood abortion controversy.
“The undercover tape taken by a pro-life group was damaging as two Planned Parenthood doctors talked about selling and harvesting organs from dead babies. That’s against the law and eight states are now investigating Planned Parenthood.”
O’Reilly noted that cable news networks such as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN did give the story a lot of time. But not on the big network news. He said that CBS spent a total of seven minutes and 21 seconds on the story. NBC spent three minutes and four seconds, while ABC spent just 46 seconds.
The Planned Parenthood story has been religiously covered on Fox News, especially by O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, and Sean Hannity. Since Fox News is known to be a right wing-influenced network, this is expected. However, the story has become a lot bigger than just Fox News and religious zealots. In fact, according to the Daily Signal, several mainstream companies have backed away from Planned Parenthood.
“Representatives from Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Co. and Xerox say they’ve asked Planned Parenthood to remove their names as corporate donors to the embattled organization.”
In addition, Planned Parenthood has removed the list of advertisers from their website. You can expect companies to back down as the controversy has upset pro-choice people almost as much as pro-lifers. However, the New York Times claims there is a campaign of deception against the organization.
“A hidden-camera video released last week purported to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells tissue from aborted fetuses. It shows nothing of the sort…Clearly, the shorter version was edited to eliminate statements by Dr. Nucatola explaining that Planned Parenthood does not profit from tissue donation, which requires the clear consent of the patient.”
The New York Times goes on to note that according to a letter sent by Roger Evans, who is a lawyer for Planned Parenthood, the (edited) video is a result of a huge campaign of deception. Of course, not everybody is buying into this.
Whether the video is being blown out of proportion or not, one thing is for sure: The abortion issue will be very important to the upcoming presidential campaign. You can bet that for the next year, Bill O’Reilly will have a report on abortion and the evils of Planned Parenthood almost every night. It’s just like the issues of illegal immigration and the “War on Christmas.”
Bill O’Reilly knows his audience.
[Photo Credit: Forbes]
