January 26, 2016

CBS News' Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford went to bat for David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress on the CBS Evening News.

After opening the segment with a general discussion of Daleiden's activities, Crawford turned to her so-called First Amendment concerns and Cornell University Professor Michael Dorf.

Dorf expressed concern that it could "chill undercover investigations by legitimate journalists."

"The tactics are also used by so-called citizen journalists, activists from environmentalists to animal rights groups seeking to expose wrongdoing," Crawford intoned.

She then went on to compare Daleiden's operation to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which was the result of his undercover work exposing the meat packing industry.

Dorf then backed up Crawford by saying, "A lot of these organizations operate in secret, so you need someone to go in under false pretenses because otherwise there's no way that the public will get access to them."

None of this means a hill of beans, you understand. David Daleiden and his partners falsified legal identity documents -- drivers' licenses -- to gain access to organizations who provide health care to poor women. There are myriad laws about health privacy -- HIPAA, for example -- that are in place to protect people from invasions of private interactions between women and their doctors.

But Crawford never says one word about that, instead making it sound as if Daleiden and his bogus Center for Medical Progress were just simply being journalists doing journalists' things.

CBS News hasn't learned a damned thing since the days of Lara Logan and Sharyl Attkisson. They're run by conservative old men with conservative views who don't seem to see anything the least bit wrong with "activists" falsifying government documents in order to infiltrate an organization that provides health services to women.

Shame on the lot of them. Oh, and Jan. Consider THIS post a form of journalism, too. Under my own name, even.

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