Columbia Journalism Review: Why the undercover Planned Parenthood videos aren’t journalism
THIS PAST JANUARY, a Texas grand jury investigating whether Planned Parenthood had illegally profited from selling baby parts not only cleared the organization of any misconduct but also pointed the finger back at its main accuser, indicting him on a felony charge.
David Daleiden, a 27-year-old anti-abortion advocate from Davis, California, tried to incriminate Planned Parenthood through hidden-camera videos. In his defense he is, in effect, pleading journalism. His Irvine-based Center for Medical Progress “uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press,” he said in a statement released immediately after the indictment.
But a close analysis of his video footage and his actions shows that what he produced doesn’t qualify as journalism on legal or ethical grounds.
Like the Texas grand jury, an examination by the Los Angeles Times and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program concluded that Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, his colleague and co-defendant, apparently conspired to violate the law. The reporting stemmed from a unique collaboration between Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and a professional news outlet. Los Angeles Times reporter Paige St. John and students in the Investigative Reporting Program produced a three-part series about the Planned Parenthood videos, First Amendment issues, Daleiden’s legal troubles, and the videos’ effects on the fetal tissue market. I was one of the Berkeley graduate students who took part in this project.
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/why_the_man_who_made_undercover_planned_parenthood_videos_isnt_a_journalist.php
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