By Peter Heck

The 15 felonies filed by the state of California include one count of unlawfully recording a person without consent for each of the 14 individuals filmed by defendants David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress. The last charge is conspiracy to invade privacy.

Even a cursory reading of the law covering these types of situations reveals that even though California is a two-party consent state for recordings, such consent is required only in situations where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy for the parties involved. To even the most ardent child-killing apologist, it’s hard to argue that public restaurants with multiple individuals conversing out loud around a table are places where one would have such an expectation. Further, it is commonly known that people have a right to record their own conversations.

So just like what unfolded in Houston, where Planned Parenthood cronies attempted similar political revenge, the charges against Daleiden and Merritt are likely to be dismissed.

What may end up being the real story is the utter silence from journalists on this rather obvious political attack orchestrated by a powerful, taxpayer-funded industry and the politicians it buys against investigative reporters. After all, just think of all the hidden camera exposÃ©s you’ve seen from virtually every media entity. It’s a tactic at the heart of undercover, fact-finding, whistleblowing journalism.

And now those very outlets that have utilized this method are either conspicuously silent or are actually cheering the formidable political forces attempting to silence and intimidate Daleiden and Merritt. So much for “speaking truth to power.”

What makes the media’s behavior even more bizarre is that for the past several months these same networks and agencies have been doing a lot of pearl-clutching and hand-wringing over Donald Trump’s “unprecedented attacks on the free press.” A simple Google search of the words “Donald Trump attacks free press” caused my computer to overheat just trying to compile all the story hits.

Yet when political leaders like former California Attorney General and current Senator Kamala Harris and current California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (the man who filed the charges) take in massive donations from Planned Parenthood in exchange for letting the abortion giant assist in authoring laws that criminalize undercover journalism, these “free press” titans yawn?

To objective eyes, what is happening in California is an obvious case of political collusion amongst the powerful to use the gun of government to silence journalists. If you are okay with that, save yourself the embarrassment of ever pretending to be a friend of the press. And that is what the major newspapers and broadcast networks are revealing — that they are champions of a political agenda, not courageous journalism.

Oddly enough, that’s precisely why Donald Trump has been attacking them in the first place — their partisan hackery masquerading as journalism.