Eye, I'm not a subscriber either, but it let me see the article. Here's the part about Fiorina.
“Mr. Christie’s mendacity pales, however, in comparison to that of Carly Fiorina,” Krugman then asserts. There’s a paragraph disparaging her business career, followed by this:
But the truly awesome moment came when she asserted that the videos being used to attack Planned Parenthood show “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” No, they don’t. Anti-abortion activists have claimed that such things happen, but have produced no evidence, just assertions mingled with stock footage of fetuses.
To support this claim, Krugman links to a post by Vox’s
Sarah Kliff titled “Carly Fiorina Is Wrong About the Planned Parenthood Tapes. I Know Because I Watched Them.” Go to the post and you find this correction:
This story initially said I had watched all the Planned Parenthood sting videos. In fact, I reviewed all sting footage released by August 13th, which included all the footage shot inside Planned Parenthood clinics—which was where a scene like the one Fiorina describes would have been.There is some more recent footage shot outside Planned Parenthood clinics that I had not seen. But that footage, according to the Fiorina campaign, is also not the source of the scene the candidate described. So far, the Fiorina campaign has not been able to point to video with the scene Fiorina spoke of in the debate.
Note that the headline still claims Fiorina is “wrong,” even though Kliff’s corrected claim is merely that Fiorina hasn’t proved herself right to Kliff’s satisfaction. The
Federalist manages to find the video that eluded Kliff:
In the video in question, a technician is talking about harvesting the brain of an alive, fully formed fetus. While she tells her story, there is footage of another baby of roughly the same gestational age as the one whose brain she harvested. This baby is seen still kicking and its heart still beating.While it is obviously not the same baby as the one she harvested the brain of, the footage helps viewers to understand what a 19-week old baby looks like when hearing the testimony of an ex-employee who harvested brains from babies of the same age.
The Los Angeles Times’s
Michael Hiltzikcharacterized Fiorina’s description of the video as “a pure fabrication.” His post includes an update claiming vindication based on the Federalist piece:
The website’s own analysis shows that it’s Fiorina who is in the wrong. It acknowleges [sic] that neither of the two fetuses in the [Center for Medical Progress] video is the one referred to in CMP’s voiceover—one is “another baby of roughly the same gestational age,” it acknowledges.
But Fiorina was accurately describing what she saw in the video. The worst one can say is that she appears to have mistaken the baby in the footage for the one the technician describes having cut up. And perhaps one can fault the video makers for creating that impression, but it seems to us the Federalist is correct when it observes that “illustrating stories with appropriate images is a common journalistic technique, one used by all media outlets.”
Now return to Krugman: “Anti-abortion activists have claimed that such things happen, but have produced no evidence, just assertions mingled with stock footage of fetuses.” That statement is false. What Krugman calls “just assertions” is the technician’s eyewitness testimony, which is a form of evidence—not incontrovertible, to be sure, but if there is evidence to controvert it, why are Planned Parenthood’s defenders so fixated on the accompanying footage?
Hiltzik answers that question: “The irony is that as the only woman in the Republican field, Fiorina has a golden opportunity to stand up for the reproductive and healthcare rights that her rivals are trampling over at every turn.” He thinks she isn’t even entitled to her opinion.