Media Matters for America, a liberal “media watchdog” front group founded and supported by liberal billionaire George Soros has staged a conference call with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and liberal activists on how to counter the videos that have shown the abortion business’ staffers aiding alleged sexual traffickers.
The videos have received national attention for showing how Planned Parenthood staff show the sex trafficking ring operators how to get abortions for the underage girls they illegally brought to the United States for the sex trade.
Instead of implementing a plan to fire staff responsible and train personnel to properly report such illegal activity to authorities, Planned Parenthood’s president and Vice President Stewart Schear joined the liberal activists on a conference call designed to strategize a response. Most of the discussion on the call reportedly centered on how to discredit the group that conducted the undercover operation, Live Action, and its president Lila Rose.
A blogger from the liberal web site AlterNet appeared on the call and asked a question about where Live Action gets its funding and complained that the group has ties to conservative organizations and leaders.
Reading the post from the blogger, Adele Stan, it is clear Richards told the callers that the strategy to defuse the criticism is essentially to ignore it and focus on rebuilding Planned Parenthood’s reputation as a provider of non-abortion services for women — even though its own figures shows abortion comprises a large total of its funding and abortions are essentially the only service offered to pregnant women.
“Cecile Richards urged progressive bloggers to spread the word that Planned Parenthood’s clients desperately need the health care provided to them by Planned Parenthood clinics, explaining that for many of the women who come in for basic gynecological services, Planned Parenthood provides the only health care they receive,” Stan wrote.
Meanwhile, Stan indicated Media Matters Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt announced his organization would continue attacking Live Action by “debunking the organization’s claims, and focusing on its methods” rather than calling on authorities to investigate the sex trafficking abuses at Planned Parenthood or holding the abortion business accountable.
Dana Loesch of the BigJournalism web site noticed the blog about the call and said she is not surprised by the moves to avoid the abuses and focus on attacking Live Action and Rose for bring the abuses to the public’s attention.
“Instead of focusing on the fact that there is an organization who turned a blind eye to child sex-trafficking, an organization that receives forced federal funding, the group of senior fellows ostensibly chose the route which affords zero defense of women, born or unborn, thereby saving them from compromising their female-hostile ideologies: attack Lila Rose. These outlets don’t see the insanity in feigning disgust that the racket was exposed, not that it occurred at all,” she writes.
“The majority of the call was spent discussing ways to discredit Rose because of her funding. They surmise that some group which donates to her pro-life magazine is a group donated to by a group given money by the Koch Brothers. So says people who just cashed a $1 million-dollar check from George Soros,” Loesch added. “Apparently some in this country think that sex trafficking is a sin inherent to all other countries but the United States, as evidenced by their refusal to condemn what actually occurred on the Planned Parenthood videos. It’s a snotty, elitist view by people who make careers of condemning snooty, elitist views. Another contradiction which, alone, would preclude further criticism.”
She concluded: “Cecile Richards and Stewart Schear respectively, sounded the alarm for the Journolist 2.0 conference call. Perhaps the mainstream media wasn’t doing enough to reconcile what Planned Parenthood says about women’s rights to what their workers are seen on tape doing: talking to a pimp about underage girls as though the girls’s bodies were commodities. A cattle auction, but in an office.”
The liberal activist group MoveOn.org has already been shown helping the Planned Parenthood abortion business in the wake of videos. In emails to its supporters, it is criticizing mainstream media publications The Hill, the Wall Street Journal and NPR for not doing enough to attack Live Action, the pro-life group that recorded the undercover investigation and released the videos.
