Using a Video Camera as a Weapon

Lila Rose and Live Action, an anti-abortion activist organization, has made a lot of news lately with her video stings of Planned Parenthood.  The Christian Science Monitor has a profile:

Lila Rose has been called the new face of the antiabortion movement. In fact, she might represent something much more ambitious.

This week, the 20-something's antiabortion organization, Live Action, released videos from Planned Parenthood clinics in New Jersey and Virginia that appear to show staffers willing to help a purported pimp get abortions for underage girls. Such guerrilla journalism tactics have been deemed "unacceptable" by critics.

But like her mentor James O'Keefe, a conservative activist who took down community organizer Acorn through a similar video sting in 2009, Ms. Rose has aims that seem to go beyond journalism. The videos, Rose acknowledges, are a weapon, and like Mr. O'Keefe, she is deploying them toward revolutionary ends.

Planned Parenthood is the target of the day. But the ultimate goal of this new generation of right-wing muckrakers is the overthrow of the perceived liberal-leaning mainstream media narrative on touchstone political issues such as guns, racism, and abortion. Rose casts her work in light of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, and her videos are the tinder for peaceful social insurrection.

"Real social revolutions are basically media revolutions ... and this is a media revolution," says Brian Anse Patrick, author of "Rise of the Anti-Media" and a communications professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio. "There's a battle going on between orthodoxies. What was unthinkable or not discussed – well, here we are, we're talking about it."

Read the whole thing.

The left is in an uproar as they try to fashion a defense for Planned Parenthood. However, Miss Rose's approach can be explained by this last part of the article:

To Rose and her compatriots, however, she is merely giving the media a taste of its own medicine.

The videos are "possibly unfair coverage," but no more unfair than the preponderance of news coverage directed at, for example, the Natonal Rifle Association in the past, says Mr. Patrick, who has studied how media organizations present conservative viewpoints.

"The classic NRA story from The New York Times or The Washington Post was a reporter would go to an NRA convention of 80,000 people and find some dummy in the parking lot with a coonskin hat and interview him," he says.

In the case of the Live Action videos, Patrick adds, "they might have found the dummy with the coon skin hat" at Planned Parenthood.

Instapundit adds this:

Indeed. Though in this case, the dummies worked at the clinics. And Planned Parenthood has the JournoList crowd plotting their media defense. 

It was 20-somethings with passion that brought down ACORN. Hopefully other 20-somethings with passion can end federal funding to Planned Parenthood and destroy that butcher shop as well.