How bad is the baby organ trafficking story for Planned Parenthood? So bad that the nation’s largest abortion provider has hired a pricey PR firm to bully media outlets into not covering the scandal.

According to Politico, Planned Parenthood hired Democratic megafirm SKDKnickerbocker to handle its public relations effort surrounding the widening organ trafficking scandal. In a series of undercover videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, multiple top Planned Parenthood executives are captured haggling over the prices of aborted baby body parts and discussing ways to maximize money earned through the harvesting and sale of human organs.

Unsurprisingly, preventing coverage of the videos is apparently key to Planned Parenthood’s survival strategy:

Planned Parenthood has hired high-profile Washington public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker as it scrambles to deal with the ongoing scandal and release of a third undercover video Tuesday showing a clinic’s staff handling fetal tissue after an abortion.



The group circulated a memo to reporters and producers late Monday that discouraged them from airing the undercover videos, arguing that they were obtained under false identification and violated patient privacy.

So there’s a concerted effort from Planned Parenthood and it’s allies to “discourage[] [media outlets] from airing the undercover videos”? The deuce, you say? That would certainly go a long way towards explaining why so many left-leaning media outlets refused to cover the second video, which captured a senior Planned Parenthood executive noting that she needed a good deal on aborted baby organs because, “I want a Lamborghini.”

BuzzFeed, for example, still does not have a single story on its website noting Planned Parenthood’s aborted baby organs-for-Lambos scheme (coincidentally, SKDKnickerbocker recently hired former BuzzFeed reporter Kate Nocera to help handle PR work for its non-profit clients). Neither does Huffington Post. Neither does Vox. The story was trending on Facebook and Twitter, yet three sites that specialize in amplifying trending and viral content refused to print a single thing about the stories. Now we know why: Planned Parenthood likely told them not to.

It gets more absurd, though. Earlier today, Politico was quite proud of its scoop about Planned Parenthood hiring a PR firm to control the crisis. It even tweeted out an excerpt from the story noting that suppressing media coverage was a key component of the embattled abortion provider’s PR strategy. Then this happened:

What do you call it when a news organization, under pressure from Planned Parenthood and its supporters to suppress coverage of its apparent organ trafficking activities, starts not just suppressing, but actually deleting statements about how media outlets are under pressure from Planned Parenthood to suppress coverage of its activities?

Mission accomplished.