After years of pretending to report on the nation’s largest and wealthiest abortion provider, former CBS reporter Kate Smith is now going to work for it. On Monday, Smith proudly announced her new position as the senior director of news content at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
During her time at CBS, Smith described her beat as covering “abortion access,” an obvious giveaway of her pro-abortion stance while posing as an objective reporter. Smith’s coverage of “abortion access” primarily focused on running puff pieces for Planned Parenthood, including softball interviews with their executives, publicizing their PR campaigns, glamorous tours of their new, state-of-the-art abortion facilities, and of course their legal battles against pro-life legislation.
Her “reporting,” such as her 2019 coverage of Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit against Missouri’s heartbeat bill, often failed to include interviews of a single pro-life lawmaker or individual. Conversely, she often omitted inconvenient facts about abortion providers and gave a megaphone to pro-abortion groups like NARAL to spin their propaganda.
Last summer, Smith announced she was leaving CBS. Now, free of her objective facade, she could finally share her “own opinions on reproductive rights,” she tweeted, as if she had previously held those opinions close to her chest.
All this to say, Planned Parenthood’s hiring of Smith is unsurprising. It’s certainly a bad look for her CBS colleagues and corporate journalists everywhere, especially so-called media reporters who didn’t make a peep about the optics of Smith’s announcement Monday, but not surprising.
If anything, it’s only surprising that Planned Parenthood would see the value in hiring someone who is much more useful carrying water for them in the allegedly unbiased corporate media, and on CBS’s dime. It’s safe to assume other corporate journalists will continue to work the PPFA propaganda beat, but what use does an abortion provider have for a “director of news content”?
Ah, well, Smith tweeted that out too. She will be leading a team to “develop expert-informed news content to combat abortion stigma and health misinformation.” Essentially, they are moving the propaganda production in-house.
Here’s more on the project I’ll be leading at @PPFA/@PPact: pic.twitter.com/0UaLl2n6yR
— Kate Smith (@byKateSmith) April 26, 2022
Americans’ distrust in corporate media makes media coverage so utterly worthless thanks to journalists like Smith, that it’s more efficient for Planned Parenthood to create and curate their own abortion misinformation rather than the old way of feeding it to pro-abortion journalists. Rather than doing all the behind-the-scenes legwork to get Smith to peddle their talking points on “CBS This Morning,” only to have Americans tune out, it’s more cost-effective to just pay Smith to peddle the propaganda direct-to-consumer.
Luckily, they found the right woman for the job.
