Here he is, on Friday night (2/3/12):

Last year the Komen Foundation gave Planned Parenthood $680,000. Now, that is the source of controversy because as you know, Planned Parenthood is primarily in business to provide abortions, more than 300,000 each year.

Later he added:

Planned Parenthood does not give women who visit its clinics the other side of the abortion story because again PP is in business for abortion.

Here is Planned Parenthood's breakdown of medical services (h/t Ezra Klein):

O'Reilly was fortunate enough to book an opposing guest--talk radio host Leslie Marshall--who wasn't prepared to argue this point:

O'REILLY: OK their big business, Planned Parenthood is abortion. And lobbying for abortion, would you concede that?

MARSHALL: I would concede that they perform abortions and they are politically --

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: No the largest part of their business, the most things that they get involved in concerns abortion, would you concede that.

MARSHALL: I can't because I've heard a good argument on both sides and information on both sides.

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: OK, well, all right, there is no good argument. The absolute truth is PP is in business for abortion; 300,000 a year and they make tons of money from it.

O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a "pimp," and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not "tax evasion"). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.

The upshot: O'Keefe misrepresented his exploits, released selectively edited videos, and the press fell for it. In fact, the ombud at the Washington Post and the public editor at the New York Times chided their respective papers for not giving the bogus "scandal" more attention. (Eventually, the Times would admit some of its ACORN errors, thanks to FAIR activists and blogger Brad Friedman.)

So it felt a little odd to see this headline in the New York Times today (2/2/11):

Group Releases Hidden Tapes of Planned Parenthood

The lead:

An anti-abortion group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released an undercover video on Tuesday that appears to show a clinic manager advising a sex trafficker how to get medical care for prostitutes as young as 14.

So this raises the question: Will these outlets learn to treat right-wing hidden camera exploits more skeptically--or maybe decide that they're not news at all? This Times account suggests that they have already forgotten what they learned last time:

The video resembles those made in 2009 by a conservative activist, James O'Keefe, in which employees of the community group Acorn appeared to advise a prostitution ring how to avoid taxes.

At the Washington Post, under the headline "Anti-Abortion Group Releases Planned Parenthood Sting Video," readers are told:

A group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released a video Tuesday that depicts two hired actors posing as a pimp and a prostitute seeking services at a New Jersey clinic, in an operation resembling one that helped take down a liberal anti-poverty group two years ago.

If by "resembles," the Post means  that this current video is getting more attention than it deserves, then, yes, there is a distinct similarity. A more reasonable write-up of the current "sting" came courtesy of Alex Pareene at Salon.com (2/1/11), who wrote that the plan

didn't really work, because Planned Parenthood quickly caught on and alerted the FBI. (BigJournalism.com exclusive: Planned Parenthood alerts the authorities when confronted by self-proclaimed human traffickers!) Planned Parenthood suspected that the hoaxer had ties to Live Action, an antiabortion activist group run by Lila Rose, a sometime O'Keefe partner-in-undercover-stinging. And Live Action confirmed its involvement by posting the sad results of its exhaustive video investigation today. It caught one staffer possibly advising a make-believe pimp to send a make-believe underage prostitute somewhere where her abortion would not be reported. (It is obviously impossible to tell what actually happened without the unedited video.) (And also this Planned Parenthood alerted the authorities about the weird visit.)

Pareene points out:

These conservative undercover "hoaxes" are best understood as an attempt to make their fantasies real. In order to make animate the world that they feverishly imagine, they must themselves become the unsavory characters with bad motivations that they enjoy thinking populate these hotbeds of degenerate liberal activity.

The corporate media problem here is quite serious, since there is a deep-seated feeling that what right-wing activists do should get more coverage, to make up for the nonexistent liberal bias in the mainstream media. This sensibility creates the media "appetite" for the ACORN hoax, the Shirley Sherrod hoax, and on and on.

At this point, it's not a question of media "falling" for this stuff, but being eager to act as a megaphone for these right-wing fantasies.

The choice of terms makes a crucial difference in the way the issue of violence against women's health clinics is discussed. Take an AP piece that ran after Roeder was convicted, which ran under the headline "Conviction Angers Anti-Abortion Militants" (1/30/10):

Testifying in his own defense, a remorseless and resolute Roeder insisted he had committed a justified act for the defense of unborn children by killing Dr. George Tiller, one of the country's few physicians to offer late-term abortions. It was a bold legal strategy that, if successful, had the potential to radically alter the debate over abortion by reducing the price for committing such an act of violence.

When it failed, those who share Roeder's passionate, militant belief against abortion were outraged: One said they are getting tired of being treated as a "piece of dirt" unable to express the reasons for such acts in court. So while relieved at the outcome, abortion-rights advocates worry a verdict that should be a deterrent will instead further embolden those prone to violence.

It's hard to imagine AP publishing an article that treated the claim that "terrorism" was justifiable as a "bold legal strategy" with the "potential to radically alter the debate," or suggest that handing out a lesser sentence to a "terrorist" might avoid "emboldening" others in his movement.  That's because the word "terrorist" comes with an assumption that killing people to promote your cause is inherently illegitimate.  When the issue is abortion, however, it seems like the corporate media thinks the jury is still out.

CNN featured William Schneider, Sanjay Gupta and Bill Press. On Fox, Bill O'Reilly defended his use of "baby killer" and "death mill" to describe Dr. Tiller and his clinic. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann--who the last time I checked in spent a whole segment making fun of Miss Anti-Gay Marriage California's breast implants with waspish misogynist Michael Musto--had only men: Slate's Will Saletan, who thinks we can "end" abortion by stigmatizing women with unwanted pregnancies, because right now everyone is just too kind....

In the more than three decades since Roe v. Wade, "the fetus" gradually became the star of the abortion drama, and the voices of women who had abortions, aka "the woman," leached out of the public discussion. How many embryos can dance on the head of a pin--now that's interesting! Off-the-cuff judgments about how late is too late and what kinds of health problems count as serious--everyone's a doctor!

Noticing that "the murder of Dr. Tiller has gotten more women telling their stories," Pollitt calls that "a crucial, good thing"--but "not so that panels of pundits can approve or disapprove but so that society can hear, firsthand, what girls and women go through." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Fred Clarkson on Tiller Murder" (6/5/09).