On March 28th David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, undercover journalists from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) were slapped by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra with 15 felony charges for their videos exposing Planned Parenthood as an organization with questionable and potentially criminal activity.
According to Live Action News, Becerra considered what the journalists had done a violation of privacy:
“The right to privacy is a cornerstone of California’s Constitution, and a right that is foundational in a free democratic society,” Becerra said in a statement. “We will not tolerate the criminal recording of confidential conversations.”
By Becerra’s logic, any undercover journalism would be in danger in California and very likely met with charges. But evidently, the reality is that charges happen when the undercover journalists are investigating abortion chains.
It would appear, Becerra is fine with undercover investigative journalism, as long as it doesn’t expose potentially criminal activity on the part of Planned Parenthood and fetal tissue providers. Becerra’s hypocrisy is evidenced in the lack of conviction of two animal rights organizations, Mercy for Animals and Compassion Over Killing (COK), who exercised undercover journalism tactics similar to that of the CMP in order to expose animal cruelty in California.
The Federalist provides additional details:
In 2009, a COK posing as an employee at a hatchery in Santa Cruz, California, secretly filmed some of the ways chicks and ducklings were being abused.
“The heartbreaking video shows severely injured baby birds who were mangled on machinery casually tossed aside into waste buckets and left to suffer for hours,” a press release describing the video footage reads. “Eventually, these injured birds along with healthy but unwanted ‘surplus’ chicks were dumped like trash into an often-clogged eggshell disposal chute, where they met a violent death.”
This upsetting video allowed COK to pursue legal action against the hatchery, putting it out of business in 2012. When it comes to animal rights, Becerra clearly (and rightly) understands that the party at fault are not those exposing wrongdoing, but those engaging in it. However, when it comes to the nation’s largest abortion giant, Becerra has a different song to sing. Instead of prosecuting the violation of human rights exposed by the CMP journalists perpetrated by Planned Parenthood, the journalists themselves are instead viciously persecuted!
As reported by National Review, Becerra charged Daleiden and Merritt “on the grounds that ostensibly business-related conversations among strangers held in restaurants and at conferences were in fact “confidential,” and so recording them without every participant’s consent violated California eavesdropping laws.”
If Becerra really believes what the journalists from the Center for Medical Progress did to be such a violation of privacy, why weren’t organizations such as COK and Mercy for Animals held to the same standard? Could it be that the California justice system embodied by Becerra has created a double standard? It is clearly unfair to prosecute organizations or person(s) differently based upon one’s personal feelings on the issue exposed by the undercover journalists. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is unethically stabbing the CMP investigators in an attempt to delegitimize the outrageous activity and human rights atrocities committed by Planned Parenthood.
