Genevieve Wood writing at the Heritage foundation’s Daily Signal offers a perceptive article about presumptions and bias and “spin” of CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota in her approach to interviewing James Lankford, R-Okla. about Planned Parenthood’s harvesting and selling of human organs. Camerota also refers to the effort to re-allocate the half billion in federal funds that currently is spent on Planned Parenthood to other less ethically and legally challenged organizations, as an effort to “shut down the government” in order to de-fund Planned Parenthood. View the six-minute video and read Woods comments. Re-posted here in its entirety as permitted. Our brief add-on will follow.
The Poll Numbers on the Planned Parenthood Scandal CNN Left Out
A May 2015 Gallup poll asked, “Should abortion be legal?” Here’s how the numbers broke down:*
Twenty-nine percent said abortion should be legal under any circumstances.
Fifty-one percent said abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances.
Nineteen percent said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.
Here’s what Camerota said:
“That’s 80 percent of respondents who believe abortion should be kept legal.” (She added together the 29 percent who said abortion should be legal in any circumstance and 51 percent who said it should be allowed only in certain circumstances.)
Here’s what Camerota could have said:
“That’s 70 percent of Americans who believe there should be limits on abortion.” (Adding together the 51 percent who said it should be legal only in certain circumstances and the 19 percent who said it should not be legal under any circumstances.)
Those who identify as pro-choice are more inclined to report the poll the way CNN did, and those who identify as pro-life are likely to use the latter number—the point being, in this particular poll and many others, you can “interpret the data” to get the spin you want.
I also found interesting that while CNN chose to show questions from a Monmouth University Poll showing that a majority of respondents favored the use of fetal tissue for research and that 49 percent opposed cutting off federal funds to Planned Parenthood, they conveniently left out the response to this question:
“Have you seen or heard recent news about videos that supposedly show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of aborted fetus tissue, or not?”
Here were the responses:
Only 27 percent said they had heard a lot.
Only 21 percent said they had heard a little.
But 53 percent of respondents said they had not heard about the story at all.
I wonder how different the other answers in the poll about fetal tissue research and defunding Planned Parenthood would have been if the 74 percent of people who had heard or seen little to nothing had indeed seen the videos.
Of course, as the Media Research Center points out, the death of Cecil the lion has received more than four times the coverage in one week by the network news media than the five undercover videos released over the past three weeks showing Planned Parenthood committing potentially criminal acts.
CNN didn’t mention those numbers, either.
The video reveals Camerata is not merely probing but argumentative. The bias of Camerata’s interpretation of the Gallup data is astounding even with the typical built in bias of abortion polling that constantly fails to provide accurate information about the extent of the abortion license in America.
Polls that ask about “Planned Parenthood” suffer from the failure to carefully differentiate between Planned Parenthood the organization and the concept of “planned parenthood.” Some trade names are confused with the generic, or the trademark term is used for the generic. Consider this analogy: Let’s say Kleenex has a government contract but had been indicted for dangerous or unethical practices in its corporate research program regarding tissue but few people had ever heard about the matter. Polling questions that ask about “no government funding for “Kleenex” might be interpreted by low information voters as the generic” kleenex.” Respondents might answer in a way disposed to people having their “kleenex” when no policy change would affect the myriad of companies offering competing interchangeable products.
And we wonder . . . Has Camerata ever posed a question to Obama or any Democrat for that matter about their willingness to “shut down government to fund the organization Planned Parenthood rather than simply distribute the dollars to public community health agencies and others doing the same thing? ”
Until recently Camerata was a Fox News personage. Any presumption about the inherent authenticity of Fox News personnel as regards fairness, bias, competency is naive. We wonder, how does a journalist go from signing on with”fair and balanced” and “we report, you decide” to CNN, or NBC? Do they consider Fox slogans as mere marketing ploys? If so then where was their journalistic integrity to go along with such?
Personally I don’t think media entities put a lot of emphasis on integrity or objectivity, and do so only for show when some irrefutable bias gets exposed. The endemic bias of pack journalism and the drive-by media goes on. The easy interchangeability of news reporters between broadcast outlets each claiming superior objectivity is pretty pathetic reflection on journalism.
R Mall
* note this was well before the recent video expose of Planned Parenthood’s grisly abortion business which includes selling organs.
