California Throws Books At Reporter Who Exposed Baby Body Trafficking
Let s first put aside that Daleiden, as director of the Center for Medical Progress, is a pro-life activist which is not a crime. He should have the same right to penetrate the practices of America s abortion providers and report his findings just as other reporters and publications investigate other matters.
Consider the multitude of covertly conducted investigations exposing threats to public health and safety, racism, and various other injustices, dating back to the dawn of our republic. To mention a few: In a classic case of disguised reporters using hidden cameras, ABC Prime Time Live outed Food Lion s alleged unsanitary food handling practices. Dateline NBC deployed decoys and hidden cameras to expose men who solicited sex with minors on the Internet. Vanity Fair had a clandestine reporter join a tour group to the Holy Land to probe then-President George W. Bush s alleged ties to religious right leaders.
Undercover Chicago Tribune reporters, working from the inside as employees, exposed life-threatening conditions in nursing homes. Another Tribune reporter worked undercover in the city s election board to reveal widespread election fraud. Chicago Sun-Times reporters, working inside, turned up dangerous practices at abortion clinics. The paper also opened a bar, the Mirage, in a sting using hidden cameras to bare shakedowns by city inspectors.
Jerry Thompson of the Nashville Tennessean infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan to provide a first-person account of its racist practices and beliefs. BBC used clandestine students to describe a sex for grades scandal. In Los Angeles, CBSN s David Goldstein regularly goes undercover.
The Washington Post captured a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service by disclosing disgusting and unsanitary conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The reporters never identified themselves as such, which, according to Brooke Kroeger, a New York University law and journalism professor, defines their action as investigative reporting. It is, she argued, yet another demonstration of how deception in investigative reporting is not only permissible but a necessary tool regularly exposing wrongdoing that can t be found any other way.
Even if you’re pro-abortion, which I’m not, you might very well object to the sale of the resulting dead baby parts as creating perverse incentives, which it pretty clearly has.