Topic: Media Research Center
Can Brent Bozell get more dishonest in his attacks on MSNBC hosts and defense of Rush Limbaugh? Yes, he can.
In a March 16 NewsBusters post, Bozell responds to Bill O'Reilly's criticism of his Media Research Center demanding that MSNBC fire Ed Schultz and other hosts whose existence offends him. In doing so, Bozell references only his plans to target MSNBC advertisers and not his demands for firings, something his despised liberal rival, Media Matters, has not even called for. (Media Matters has publicized Limbaugh advertisers; the only targeting the MRC has done to date, meanwhile, is to advertisers who dropped Limbaugh's show in reaction to his three-day tirade of sleaze against Sandra Fluke.)
Meanwhile, in a March 19 letter to MSNBC president Phil Griffin making the additional demand that the network fire Al Sharpton, Bozell makes this statement:
I have also made known the fact that your network is the mouthpiece for the George Soros funded Media Matters, a radical group whose mission is to slander everyone who disagrees with its fringe leftwing ideology. I also pointed out these assaults by MSNBC have nothing to do with what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke, and everything to do with censoring prominent voices on the right. Instead of reporting on the woeful state of our economy and the catastrophic debt crisis, MSNBC goes after Limbaugh with entirely unmerited and phony moral righteousness.
Of course, for Bozell, his crusade against MSNBC has everything to do with "what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke" -- specifically, his increasingly desperate efforts to get people talking about anything else. It's become all too clear that Bozell is not offended by the denigration of a woman when a conservative is doing the denigrating. And it's laughable that Bozell insists that any criticism of Limbaugh's blatant misogyny is about "censoring prominent voices on the right" while he tries to keep up the charade that he's not trying to censor prominent voices on the left. He has demanded that people be fired from appearing on TV over things he refuses to criticize Limbaugh for -- it's hard to be more censorious than that!
(Plus, he seems more than a little jealous that Media Matters is a much more effective organization than the MRC. No wonder he tries to pretend they don't exist.)
If Bozell wants to see "entirely unmerited and phony moral righteousness," all he needs to do is look in the mirror.
P.S. In his letter demanding Sharpton be fired, Bozell cites as one of his offenses "denigrating homosexuals." Really? One of the main reasons for existence for Bozell's own organization is to denigrate homosexuals, so it's hard to imagine he's genuinely upset at all by Sharpton doing it.
