On the June 24 edition of Lady Parts Justice’s Repro Madness podcast, hosts Ashley Gray and Sharron Paul interviewed Media Matters deputy outreach director Rachel Tardiff about the abortion misinformation being spread on cable news.

During the interview, Tardiff discussed the findings of a recent Media Matters study which identified misinformation about reproductive rights topics throughout 14 months of evening cable news coverage. As Tardiff explained, Media Matters found that cable news -- and, in particular, Fox News programming -- often gave too much credibility to anti-choice misinformation. Much of the misinformation involved the smear campaign against Planned Parenthood contained in videos released by the anti-choice group the Center for Medical Progress.

From the June 24 edition of Lady Parts Justice’s Repro Madness:

ASHLEY GRAY (HOST): So, this whole study was fascinating to me. And it’s really cool to me that it happened at such a perfect time, when the Center for Medical Progress -- the quote unquote “sting operation” that they did on Planned Parenthood came out -- so awesome timing there. Bravo, Media Matters.

Media does matter. And speaking of media mattering, it’s incredible to me how much this story has influenced the political discourse. We have this congressional witch hunts led by Marsha Blackburn against Planned Parenthood. We have Mike DeWine in Ohio, the attorney general investigating Planned Parenthood. Ohio doesn’t even participate in fetal donation, but Mike DeWine made a big stink about how they dispose of fetal remains and all of this crazy stuff. It’s insane to me how tightly connected media and politics and money and corporations -- it’s like this scary tangled web that I’m scared that we’ll never get out of.

RACHEL TARDIFF: It is, it’s really scary. In this case it was especially interesting -- yeah, interesting is the word I would use, because disturbing makes me too sad -- but in an interesting way to see how the lies that were channeled from CMP and other anti-abortion extremists were basically laundered through the media and resulted in a lot of these investigations or the defunding fights of Planned Parenthood, the congressional panel -- and despite the fact that investigation after investigation after investigation either found no wrongdoing on Planned Parenthood’s part or cleared them entirely. In fact, the investigations in Texas actually led to the indictment of David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress and his co-conspirator Sandra Merritt.

Despite all of this we saw that what really got coverage were the videos and the claims, not the actual truth in the wake of the claims, not the fact that investigations were consistently clearing Planned Parenthood, and then what you see is anti-choice politicians and anti-choice speakers basically using these myths that are being perpetuated by members of the media, especially Fox News -- which was very ripe territory for CMP. Basically using these claims in the media to try to legitimize their attacks on abortion access and completely ignoring the fact that independent investigations and independent analysis found that the videos were completely bunk, that they had been heavily edited, that in fact even sentences were spliced together to say something completely different, completely taking out of context any statements from Planned Parenthood staff -- and yet were pointing back to previous media coverage to justify their actions without acknowledging the fact that the previous reports were based completely on lies.

[...]

GRAY: It’s crazy to me. I have a friend whose mother is an avid Fox News watcher, and when all of this Planned Parenthood stuff came out -- the fake videos, et cetera -- she was just, she believed every single word she heard. People really depend on these networks to get their news, they believe that it’s all factual. And it’s really scary that a lot of them, according to your study, are just blatantly lying.

TARDIFF: And that’s a really important point. Over 700 statements containing misinformation about abortion were made in that 14-month period on Fox News. And as I said, 70 percent of those Fox News appearances were by anti-choicers and what’s really important to remember there is if you look at the audience of people who only listens to Fox News -- who gets all of their news from Fox News -- and study after study shows that regular Fox News viewers are less inclined to trust other outlets, the more that they watch Fox, basically. So if you consider the fact that this misinformation is rampant, Fox is also most likely to bring on hard-core anti-abortion people.

GRAY: Yeah.