Last night he was, yet again, dishonest about Planned Parenthood. He showed us a snippet of a video from a known dishonest video producer - someone in the same category as James O'Keefe - and leapt to an entirely unreasonable conclusion. He got it almost entirely wrong, and that's because he allowed his preconceived notions to color what REALLY happened.
Molding one's worldview to one's preconceived notions is most often a rightwinger's trait, but there are even some here at Daily Kos who fall victim to it when their pet project or dearly-held beliefs are challenged.
Bill O'Reilly unfairly concluded that **Warning - link goes to Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show's website
Planned Parenthood is advising women to abort because of gender choice.
But it's not possible to think that Planned Parenthood is advising women to do anything, given the event he had just shown his viewers. The Planned Parenthood employee didn't "advise" anyone to do anything. The PP worker didn't bring up the subject at all. The worker simply supported the woman's right to choose what's best for her.
See below the fold for more details about Bill O'Reilly's latest shortcoming.
As Media Matters so clearly points out
Discredited anti-choice activist Lila Rose went on The O'Reilly Factor to push her latest hoax video attacking Planned Parenthood. Rose and host Bill O'Reilly want people to think that, in the words of Rose's group, Planned Parenthood is complicit in "widespread sex-selection by means of abortion." In fact, Planned Parenthood has stated that it "finds the concept of sex selection deeply unsettling" and the organization "does not offer sex determination services; our ultrasound services are limited to medical purposes."
Furthermore, Huffington Post reported that Planned Parenthood "condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide 'high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into' its health centers."
O'Reilly and Rose mentioned none of this. Instead, they aired footage from Rose's hoax video of a person walking into a Planned Parenthood office and pretending to be a patient. O'Reilly and Rose pretended that the actions of the employee were representative of the organization. O'Reilly even asked "Are we now China in this country? If Planned Parenthood is advising woman to abort because of gender choice, then we are China. And you should remember that the next time a politician or famous person endorses Planned Parenthood."
O'Reilly knows full well that one individual's actions do NOT necessarily represent the position of the group. To assert otherwise is ignorant.
And O'Reilly should have known that, due to her behavior, the worker in question was let go by Planned Parenthood.
And by the time of his report, O'Reilly should have known that Planned Parenthood had released a statement debunking the assertions that Rose's group and O'Reilly were pushing.
Here's the full statement by Planned Parenthood via the link above.
A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman told The Huffington Post on Tuesday the staffer in the video "did not follow our protocol" for dealing with "a highly unusual patient scenario."
"Planned Parenthood insists on the highest quality patient care, and if we ever become aware of a staff member not meeting these high standards we take swift action," she said in a written statement. "Within three days of this patient interaction, the staff member's employment was ended and all staff members at this affiliate were immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters. Today opponents of Planned Parenthood are promoting an edited video of that hoax patient encounter."
This spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America also told The Huffington Post that the organization condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide "high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into" its health centers. That means that no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions (Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Illinois).
At the end of the segment (I didn't watch it all - I never can stomach watching all of any of Bill O'Reilly's segments - but I did read the transcript for this diary) he gets even more outrageous. He says
But here is what really disturbs me. 2010, Planned Parenthood received about $500 million of taxpayer money. That's my money. That's your money. Went in, government grants, to Planned Parenthood, representing 47 percent of the entire funding of Planned Parenthood.
So I'm paying now. I'm paying for a counselor in Austin, Texas, to tell a Young woman, "You know what? You don't like the gender, I'll set you up. We'll get rid of the fetus. We'll get rid of it. You don't have the problem. We'll make it happen."
NO PP COUNSELOR TOLD ANYONE to have an abortion if she was unhappy with the gender of that fetus. What they did was suggest that they'd ALLOW THE WOMAN to make her own decisions about her medical choices.
It used to be one of the standards in the Republican platform that we keep government out of areas where others don't need to be sticking their noses, but no longer. And then they're entirely hypocritical about the whole thing too! Now, they want us to be able to tell a woman why she can choose to have an abortion and why she can't. Whatever THEY determine is a good enough reason is okay, and anything else isn't - forcing THEIR morality upon everyone else. Forcing their religious beliefs upon us all, rather than allowing everyone to follow their own religious precepts - the THING that CREATED the USA! Not everyone thinks that abortion is wrong. On top of that, until the fetus can survive outside the womb, it's unfair to force a woman to be an unwilling incubator, NO MATTER WHAT HER REASONS FOR NOT WANTING TO REMAIN PREGNANT! It's a choice that she should be allowed to make after consultation with a medical professional.
