Topic: Media Research Center
Ranting about "liberal media bias" is so much easier when you pretend there's no conservative media bias.
That's what the Media Research Center's Tim Graham and Brent Bozell have done in their Nov. 22 column ranting about a piece by an actual longtime journalist, James Warren -- who is not a political activist like Graham and Bozell -- for the journalism training and ethics group Poynter pointing out how the "liberal media" isn't really a thing.They whine:
Rupert Murdoch is looking at unloading some of his Hollywood assets, and among the suspected potential buyers are The Walt Disney Co. (ABC) and Comcast Corp. (NBC). To Warren, this somehow heralds a new era of "not just unceasing consolidation but the unceasing influence of folks of distinctly conservative ideology." The Murdochs explore selling off assets, and that's conservative consolidation?
Not only that, Warren says the "caricature" of a liberal media is "dubious" and can be rebutted by the fact that the "aggressively conservative" Sinclair Broadcasting Group "is primed to become the biggest local TV broadcaster." Yet Sinclair stations are routinely airing network news and entertainment content from ... ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.
But Murdoch is not selling his right-wing news channel. And Graham and Bozell conveniently omit mention of another key example Warren provided: David Pecker, pal of Donald Trump and owner of the National Enquirer and recent purchaser of Us Weekly. (It just so happens that the managing editor of Pecker's publications, Dylan Howard, was just accused of sexual harassment and being Harvey Weinstein's lackey in using Pecker's publications to undermine allegations of sexual harassment by the once-powerful Hollywood producer.)
And, as the MRC has done in the past, Graham and Bozell deflect the actual issue with Sinclair, which is highly biased local newscasts ordered to run conservative commentary, turning them into Trump boosters.
Graham and Bozell then moved to the childish-insult phase -- literally. They actually declared that one college professor who committed the offense of disagreeing with them "sounds dumber than a grade schooler." And they weren't done insulting anyone who won't adhere to right-wing dogma:
Warren then cites Danny Hayes, a political scientist at George Washington University who doubles down on the idiocy. "The debate about ideological bias in the media is not productive at all," he says. That's true ... if you're a liberal who wants the average (and, apparently, ignorant) media consumer to think the news is objective. Hayes insists "the social science research finds virtually no evidence in the mainstream media of systematic liberal or conservative bias."
Hayes should be teaching geology because, clearly, he is living under a rock. We've been churning out daily evidence of a dramatic liberal bias in the "objective" news media for 30 years, and this "scientist" in Washington, D.C., thinks there's "virtually no evidence"?
Anecdotal, incidental evidence -- which makes up the vast majority of what the MRC claims is "liberal bias" -- is not real evidence. And we've seen the dismal, slanted results the MRC gets when it issues what it purports to be actual "media research."
If your go-to response to criticism is to hurl juvenile insults at your critics, you have no actual defense. Graham and Bozell just proved that.
