Topic: Media Research Center
So Breitbart had a cow recently over a New York Times reporter emailing Environmental Protection Agency employees seeking information -- which, as the Washington Post's Erik Wemple points out, is kinda how journalism works.
Cue the Media Research Center's Tim Graham, whom we last saw insisting that Mike Pence denying something means more than 75 people interviewed by the Times who say otherwise. Graham rants in an Aug. 8 post:
Wemple is right that reporters don’t just have leakers call them up and leak; they often go out looking for disgruntled or ideological insiders to become their anonymous sources. But in hailing [Times reporter Coral] Davenport as “unassailable,” he’s ignoring the obvious point of Davenport’s liberal get-Pruitt agenda. After the election, Davenport lamented the victory of Donald Trump as a "new peril" for climate-change doomsters.
The truly naive people believe that journalism is something created objectively, serving a readership without any explicit attempt to convince readers to support one political side. Anyone who reads The New York Times for a week should know what they’re attempting to manufacture when they create the “news.” They function as Governing Partners when Democrats are in power, and are much more hostile and thumping their chests when the Other Party is in charge.
Graham has this cynical view of journalism because that's how the MRC runs its own "news" outlet, CNSNews.com. Terry Jeffrey, Michael W. Chapman -- and, we must presume, Brent Bozell -- see CNS not as a place for journalism to take place but as a propaganda mill.Under a Democratic president, for instance, only negative news about unemployment must be reported, while a Republican president means the news must be positive.
Because CNS operates this way, Graham assumes that every news outlet operates this way. And because he and CNS are so far right, he thinks that any news outlet that doesn't look and sound like CNS must therefore be "liberal" and must be destroyed.
Of course, unlike the Times, CNS would never be caught doing actual reporting -- it's much more content to be a loyal Trump stenographer. Graham, meanwhile, can't seem to understand why the rest of the media aren't Trump stenographers.
Graham concludes by huffing: "The email demonstrates the process or [sic] organizing anonymous sources to embarrass or inhibit government officials like Scott Pruitt from doing conservative things." If "conservative things" can be stopped simply and solely by exposing them to the light of day and, thus, embarassment, how good can they really be?
