Topic: Media Research Center
A Jan. 4 Media Research Center press release quotes Brent Bozell: "As anyone who has read our reports knows, the MRC has not taken a position on global warming." We're not sure what "reports" Bozell is referring to, but when the vast majority of MRC's global warming-related content that we've seen is devoted to attacking the idea, it's hard to claim with a straight face that it has "not taken a position."
Take, for example, a Jan. 9 NewsBusters post by Rich Noyes -- no mere blogging schmo, he's the MRC's research director. According to Noyes, the NBC Nightly News, after reporting that the unusually mild winter in some parts of the country on El Nino, "flip-flopped" after "a handful of lilberal complainers" proceded to "whine" and spew "mean-spirited idiocy," "repudiated" the original report. Global warming supporters "whine" and are "mean-spirited"? Nope, no "taking a position" there.
Further, Nightly News host Brian Williams hardly "repudiated" the original report. As the transcript Noyes supplied demonstrates, an updated report served up what Williams called "the rest of the story" (we thought the MRC believed in telling all relevant sides of a story). The report went on to note that "[m]any experts say" global warming "plays a part," adding: "So the unusual warmth in the Northeast could partly be the result of global warming. Indeed, even the heavy snow in the Rockies this year might be partly caused by global warming."
As the italicized phrases show, the report couched the global warming link in large doses of speculation -- hardly the "repudiation" Noyes claims it is; Noyes, meanwhile, offers no evidence that global warming is not involved.
So a top MRC official belittles global warming supporters and attacks a TV network for merely acknowledging the possibility that global warming exists -- and somehow that is not having "taken a position on global warming."
