Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has been surprisingly quiet on its official front about CNN's firing of pro-Trump sycophant (and NewsBusters columnist) Jeffrey Lord for tweeting "Sieg Heil!" at Media Matters president Angelo Carusone -- perhaps because of the MRC's own recent success in getting someone else fired from CNN, Reza Aslan. It was mentioned only once in passing at NewsBusters and had not been mentioned at at all at MRCTV and CNSNews.com immediately afterwards.
One had to go to MRC chief Brent Bozell's Twitter feed for a quick response. Bozell first complained: "@CNN's firing of @realjeffreylord falsely smears him as a Nazi. In fact he was criticizing Nazi-like tactics from the left. Slander?" He then huffed: "If @CNN objects to their commentators making Nazi comparisons, several liberals at the network should lose their jobs. What hypocrites!"
Bozell then ran to another media outlet -- not Fox News this time, but to Larry O'Connor, a former Breitbart editor who's now a right-wing radio host in Washington, D.C. Aeter admitting he had just been chatting with Lord before his radio hit, Bozell laughably echoed Lord's attack on Media Matters as "fascists" who "are using intimidation and smears and -- i'll say it right now -- flat-out lies to get conservatives thrown off the airwaves because they don't want conservative voices on the airwaves."
Bozell, of course, didn't mention his own campaign of intimidation and smears to get Aslan thrown off the air for the offense of criticizing Trump. No difference, really, though Bozell would never call himself or his organization fascists.
Bozell then went into revisionist history in recalling Rush Limbaugh's calling soldiers who opposed the Iraq War "phony soldiers": "All you have to do is listen to the transcripts and that's not what he was saying. He was talking about people playing phony soldiers and trying to get medical benefits out of it." In fact, the transcript proves quite the opposite: There was nearly two minutes between Limbaugh's reference to "phony soldiers" and his reference to a specific case of fraud.
After O'Connor brought up Aslan's firing, Bozell responded by not discussing similarity in tactics, but instead complaining that CNN took too long to fire him while it took "only four hours" for Lord to get fired.
Finally, on Aug. 14, Bozell brought his whining about Lord to his own website. He repeated the same arguments he made on the radio, including the misleading defense of Limbaugh -- almost as if they had been written out for him as talking points and he was just testing them out on the air first before committing them to an MRC site -- and tries to coin the term "smear-fired." Again he references Aslan only in passing, complaining it too so long to fire him but not about the pressure tactics he put on CNN to do so. He smears Media Matters as "leftist censors" without admitting he's a right-wing censor.
Bozell goes on to declare that "Jeffrey Lord is one of the nicest men you’ll ever meet" and that CNN, in dumping Lord while he was on his way to an appearance on the channel, "had his limo driver turn around in mid-journey from Pennsylvania to New York and take him home." Lord has a limo driiver? Real man of the people.
Bozell is essentially claiming the tactics he used to get Aslan fired by CNN shouldn't be used by anyone else to get a friend of Bozell's fired. What rank hypocrisy.
(Disclosure: I used to work for Media Matters.)
