However, her main talking point — that the footage was edited — is completely refuted by the full release of the footage in question. Her subsequent talking point of straight up character assassination has no substantiating evidence. She may have been caught in a rather obvious false statement about how many clinics are engaged in fetal organ harvesting. And, finally, just because Planned Parenthood is structured as a non-profit does not mean their organ harvesting programs are legal or ethical.

We’re two weeks into the release of videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of organs harvested from the unborn children they abort. The first video, featuring Dr. Deborah Nucatola, included the graphic discussion — over lunch — of where to crush the aborted baby to preserve her heart, liver, lungs and brain to ensure their usefulness to the buyer. The second video, featuring Dr. Mary Gatter, included discussions of “less crunchy” abortion techniques that can be used to preserve valuable human organs and the haggling over the price of those body parts, even though Planned Parenthood claims that they are only reimbursed for costs (costs which, if such a claim were true, should not vary one cent in the face of eager buyers willing to bump up the price). That video ended with Gatter saying she’d bump the price up if other affiliates were earning more for the organs. Then she joked about how she’d like to get a Lamborghini.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards gave her first interview this weekend, to George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Considering Stephanopoulos is a longtime buddy of the Clintons, who are devoted to Planned Parenthood, the interview wasn’t as servile as you might expect. Richards was unrelenting in her robotic repeating of a few talking points, but Stephanopoulos tried in his own way to push back a bit.

Here are four of the worst things we heard from Cecile “Talking Points” Richards in her interview with George Stephanopoulos.

1) How many times can I say “edited”?

Amidst a flurry of words, the main point Richards said over and over and over and over again was that Planned Parenthood’s top doctors only appear monstrous because of entrapment and the magic of video editing. “Yeah, that’s the ticket!” she should have added.

Let’s give Richards credit, here. She is literally having to defend her organization in the midst of a series of undercover videos showing her top officials joking and getting chatty about the harvesting for sale of organs from unborn children. You try to come up with a talking point that makes your group seem less evil! It’s hard. And this is clearly the best talking point they have. As much as their public relations campaign has flailed about (seriously, check out the comments in response to this trainwreck of a tweet — It appears Planned Parenthood removed the tweet, but here’s a description of it), this is the one talking point that has been used consistently over the past few weeks.

There are a few problems with this talking point, however. First and foremost is that the journalists who taped the undercover videos took the additional step of releasing the lengthy full footage of the interviews at the same time they released shortened versions. Here’s the full footage of Dr. Nucatola, running 2 hours and 42 minutes. Here’s the 9-minute cut of the full footage. Here’s the full transcript. Here’s the full footage of Mary Gatter, running 1 hour and 14 minutes. Here’s the 8-minute cut of the full footage. Here’s the full transcript. Both the full footage and the edited cuts were released at the same time and all the videos are publicly accessible. Interested parties can and should watch both videos.

Another problem with the editing charge is that it’s basically meaningless. I mean, everything is edited. The “news” clip setting up the interview with Richards was edited. All news, whether broadcast or print, is “highly” and “selectively” edited.

No one, and I mean no one, actually fits this description of “deceptive” editor better than Jon Stewart, beloved liberal media figure. Oh look here. Here are 10 times Planned Parenthood praised Jon Stewart.

One major difference between Jon Stewart, who actually doctors videos, splicing answers from one question to a completely separate question, and the undercover journalists hitting Planned Parenthood hard is that only one releases full footage for all to see.

Precisely because Planned Parenthood is running so hard with this talking point, objective journalists need to make sure people know that unlike most all the things that are edited in the world, full footage is public and ready for anyone to see. On that note, the New York Times’ Jackie Calmes falsely claimed last week that the full footage was only released after Planned Parenthood complained about the edited version. That’s incorrect. Both videos were released at the same time. I contacted the New York Times corrections desk about this factual error at 2:15 PM on Tuesday, July 21. That was a full day before the editorial page repeated the error. It remains uncorrected.

Journalists also need to sit down and watch the full videos, which many of them rather obviously haven’t done. I would actually quibble with the editing of the videos in part because they left some of the most salacious details out. For instance, by watching the full second video, I saw that Gatter flat out said that some Planned Parenthood officials wondered whether it was legal to accept so much money for the body parts given how “we didn’t have to do anything” to get them. I might have put that in the shortened video if I were one of the journalists running this project.

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Read another article on this topic: Planned Parenthood Tells Reporters To Suppress Coverage, Reporters Happily Agree

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