Planned Parenthood, NPR, Doctors Without Borders, Freedom From Religion Foundation...What do these all have in common? Besides being left-wing organizations they were also tech site Reddit.com’s first choices of “charities” they promised to donate $82,765.95 of their profits to. Each.
In a blog post Feb. 18, Reddit product manager Ryan Merket announced the company had decided to split 10 percent of its ad revenue -- a total of more than $8.2 million dollars -- to 10 different “charities” selected by the Reddit community. The winners of the contest that did not deal with net neutrality -- such as Electric Frontier Foundation and Tor Project -- were socially liberal organizations, with pro-abortion or anti-religious views.
Among the pro-abortion groups were Planned Parenthood and Doctors Without Borders. Planned Parenthood received more than $528 million, a whopping 41 percent of its revenue [1] from taxpayer funds in 2013. It is the leading contributor to pro-abortion causes and candidates, according to OpenSecrets.org [2]. The organization hardly seems lacking in resources. Why Reddit users felt that Planned Parenthood needed more money is boggling.
But they weren’t the only ones. Doctors Without Borders administers abortions as well. According to an interview with The Washington Times [3], the pro-abortion group defended its policies:
Doctors Without Borders, which has a policy of accepting no U.S. government funds, is one of the few major international humanitarian organizations with an explicit policy of providing abortions in cases where its doctors feel that’s appropriate.
“We have seen time and time again that in the absence of safe abortion care, women will seek to terminate an unwanted pregnancy by other means, and unsafe abortions very often lead to more suffering and even death,” the organization said in an email.
Another donation recipient, Freedom From Religion Foundation, is one of the leading atheist groups in the country and one of the nastiest. The atheist organization is not concerned with spreading atheism as much as it is with squashing any semblance of Christianity that its members can find. Last December the liberal Daily Show even went after the group, which they deemed “petty assholes” for forcing a restaurant owner to stop giving small discounts to customers who prayed before their meals.
NPR also made the Reddit list, and its strong liberal bias has been well-documented [4]. Of course, being a government-funded radio broadcast, does it really need more “charity?”
This isn’t the first time Reddit has revealed its liberal bias. In 2013, Reddit joined The Los Angeles Times in banning “climate change skepticism.” From the Newsbusters post [5] at the time:
Reddit announced Dec. 16, that climate skepticism was no longer allowed in academic discussions of climate change. In an op-ed explaining the decision, Reddit moderator, Nathan Allen, blasted climate skeptics and even urged the media to censor the subject. He called for newspaper editorial sections to follow suit with bans of their own.
Allen asked “if a half-dozen volunteers can keep [Reddit] from being a microphone for the antiscientific, is it too much to ask for newspapers to police their own editorial pages as proficiently?”
In response to the website’s openly liberal activities, American Family Association has urged Reddit users who may be uncomfortable with this to “be aware [6]of what their social media activities are supporting [6].”
The AFA has recently released a response [7] to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” by generating its own “Anti-Christian Bigotry Map [8]” on which the Freedom From Religion Foundation appears.
— Kristine Marsh is Staff Writer for MRC Culture at the Media Research Center. Follow Kristine Marsh on Twitter. [9]