Topic: Media Research Center
In a Feb. 11 MRC TimesWatch post, Clay Waters serves up a laughably fawning review of William McGowan's anti-New York Times book, "Gray Lady Down." Waters hyperbolically calls it "a carefully researched and devastatingly convincing critique of the Times losing its commitment to objective reporting."
Waters' employer, of course, operates a "news" division that doesn't know the meaning of objective reporting.
Throughout his slobbering review, Waters fails to identify McGowan as a conservative or a book as a conservative-oriented attack. Waters also injects his own right-wing bias into the review, at one point denouncing Obama's speech on racial issues as "unmemorable." According to who? Does anyone who isn't predisposed to denigrating every word that comes out of Obama's mouth think that?
Then again, perhaps he doesn't have to identify McGowan as a conservative, since he tacitly admits it in a sad bit of self-promotion:
In a brief foray into partisan politics, McGowan cites a fine media watchdog site called Times Watch, which analyzed a month of stories the Times did on Barack Obama and Republican John McCain during a slice of the 2008 campaign and found that positive portrayals for Obama outnumbering negative ones by a 3:1 ratio. When it came to McCain, that positive/negative ratio was reversed.
Still, Waters does attempt to keep up the pretense of McGowan being a nonpartisan writer, asserting that McGowan just wants "a much better version of the Times than is being produced by the current regime," a conclusion with which "all but the most politically in denial Americans would surely agree."
