Yesterday, The L.A. Times ran a story referencing our Thursday series covering the leaked network network memo and those “organically” produced network television shows running this week designed to funnel the unsuspecting to creepy Internet portals eager to direct your children to Planned Parenthood:
More than 100 programs on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and cable networks such as Nickelodeon and Lifetime will spotlight community service, either through explicit story lines or public service announcements featuring actors such as Emily Deschanel, Eva Longoria Parker and Rainn Wilson.
The message will be nearly ubiquitous, starting in the morning with programs such as “Today” and “The View,” and then echoed on soap operas, prime-time series and late-night shows.
Isn’t “Today” a news show that’s supposed to be doing, you know, news and not jumping to the tune of a memo that opens with “President Obama has called for…”?
Twitter users have posted messages complaining that the initiative is an abuse of the public airwaves. Writers on the blog Big Hollywood, part of the conservative news portal Breitbart.com, noted that the iparticipate.org’s database of volunteer opportunities includes postings from Planned Parenthood and groups focused on ending global warming. (The database — powered by a nonprofit Web platform called All for Good, designed by engineers from Google and other tech companies to be a single search interface for volunteers — also includes listings for anti-abortion organizations and the conservative group Tea Party Nation.)
Unless something’s changed from when we broke the story (and this wouldn’t be the first time one of these creepy volunteer portals got a scrubbing), there was one major distinction between how you could go about finding pro-baby slaughtering groups and pro-life groups.
In order to find a pro-life group you actually had to type in “pro-life” (in their attempt to criticize us, Media Matters inadvertently verifies this — see their last example) — and let me assure everyone that nowhere on the leaked network memo do the words “pro” or “life” appear separately or together. In other words, you gotta be pretty specific in what you’re looking for and this full-on network crusade has no intention of urging anyone to volunteer for pro-life groups.
However….
As Stage Right pointed out, to find Planned Parenthood you need not type in “abortion” or “child killing” or “infanticide.” Not when typing in the hottest topic of the day — health care — does the trick:
That’s a screen shot from last week from the iParticipate website and for the next five days the plan is/was to get your kids all ginned up and excited to “volunteer” — and this is a plan executed by people who equate Planned Parenthood with health care. In fact, Planned Parenthood ranked #2.
But here’s my favorite part of the story… The “Who us?” part…
Entertainment executives first hit on the idea during a board retreat in summer 2008 when they were brainstorming how to follow the “Stand Up to Cancer” project, according to Mitch Metcalf, NBC’s executive vice president of program planning and scheduling and a member of the EIF board.“We’re lucky that the Obama administration happened to think this is a worthy cause and the first lady in particular is behind this general effort,” he said. “But that just provides support and shines a spotlight on it. . . . We’re certainly not servicing the White House.”
Why would anyone think network television is servicing the White House when the memo directing everyone to “organically” create propaganda opens with, “President Obama has called for…”?
And then there’s the coincidence surrounding the laundry list of specific asks. Top three in the EIF memo: Education, health, environment… Top three in the NEA conference calls: Health care, education, environment…
Damn these lying eyes of mine.
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