Topic: Media Research Center
An Aug. 3 Media Research Center post by Jorge Bonilla takes exception to an interview frequent MRC target Jorge Ramos did with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards (boldface his):
Richards was framed as a heroic "women's health" advocate fighting the 'evil Republicans'. Planned Parenthood talking points were presented as unassailable truth - for example, the data featured above, that abortion accounts for only 3% of Planned Parenthood's services. Entirely unmentioned, however, was the fact that abortion accounts for 86% of Planned Parenthood's revenues.
If only the thing Bonilla insisted on putting in boldface was actually true. PunditFact explains why it's not, after another right-winger made the same assertion:
The top line is for non-government health services revenue, $305.3 million (which would include abortions, as well as STD testing, pregnancy tests, etc.). Of course, there are more sources of revenue than that. The lines below describe $528.4 million in federal reimbursements for services from low-income patients on Medicaid, as well as $257.4 million raised in private contributions and bequests.
The only possible way to get to 86 percent is to ignore those other sources of revenues, which account for more than 70 percent of everything Planned Parenthood takes in.
[...]
At a U.S. House hearing, Richards said abortions are expensive compared to other health services offered by Planned Parenthood. But we found no evidence of her saying, or conceding, that 86 percent of revenue is from abortion. At one point in the same meeting, she said an even lower estimate for abortion revenues was "too high."
Bonilla also defended the anti-abortion activists at the Center for Medical Progress over the unambiguous fact that their anti-Planned Parenthood videos were heavily edited: "Ramos, of all people, should know that videos are quite often edited for time considerations...right? To suggest that CMP committed some sort of malfeasance isn't only specious, it is cowardly considering that Ramos' newscast mostly ignored those videos, precisely when they were going viral."
But what "time considerations" 'were CMP editing their videos for? They were released to the Internet, which has no such time considerations. Yet they were deceptively edited anyway, with the edited versions being debunked by the full video released well after the edited versions.
