Fox News To Air Hour-Long Special In Support Of CMP's Smear Campaign Against Planned Parenthood

Fox News is reportedly set to air an hour-long special that furthers the conservative media campaign to smear Planned Parenthood with debunked accusations from deceptively edited videos that purport to show the organization is selling aborted fetal body tissue. A board member of the group behind the videos, The Center For Medical Progress, said he “expect[s] the documentary will be very much on our side,” despite the fact that the videos were found to have been manipulated.

This conservative media campaign coincides with the Republican effort to defund and investigate the women's health organization both on the federal and state level. The videos and their right-wing media coverage give Republicans renewed ammunition to defund Planned Parenthood, even going so far as threatening another government shutdown.

According to a September 1 post from Breitbart News, Fox is planning to air an hour-long special to “shine a light on the controversial undercover videos” which show how the Center Of Medical Progress' operatives “wormed their way into a position of trust with senior managers of Planned Parenthood and tissue procurement companies.” Troy Newman of the violent anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, and a board member of CMP, said, “I expect the documentary will be very much on our side. This information really made [Fox News anchor] Shannon Bream emotional.” From the Breitbart News post:

Fox News is reportedly set to air Planned Parenthood: The Hidden Harvest on September 4 at 10 p.m., which will shine a light on the controversial undercover videos that have gone viral.

The hour-long report will look inside the undercover campaign of David Daleiden and his Center for Medical Progress, how they trained themselves to be experts in at least talking about the arcane world of baby-parts harvesting, and how they wormed their way into a position of trust with senior managers of Planned Parenthood and tissue procurement companies who buy from them.

Troy Newman, president of the pro-life group Operation Rescue, helped hatch the plan with Daleiden more than three years ago. Newman, who is also on the board of Daleiden's non-profit group, told Breitbart News, “I expect the documentary will be very much on our side. This information really made [Fox News anchor] Shannon Bream emotional.”

He said the documentary would look at “how CMP came about and how it is rocking the world in exposing the 'dark harvest' of baby parts. It will be about David and the people around him and how we hatched the plan to go undercover to uncover these atrocities.”

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In announcing the report, a Fox News email said:

This summer, a series of secretly recorded videos have exposed a business in fetal tissue. Already a number of politicians have called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, a primary target of the sting, while others support the organization and call this just another salvo in the War on Women. The Fox News Reporting special ... delves into the controversy, featuring exclusive new details about the making of those videos, and investigating an industry and field of scientific research that many didn't even know existed.