Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Brent Baker somberly wrote in a Sept. 15 post:
Business tycoon T. Boone Pickens passed away this past week at age 91. In 2005, he took part in the Media Research Center’s “DisHonors Awards: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2004,” where he accepted, in jest on behalf of PBS’s Bill Moyers, the “Send Bush to Abu Ghraib Award.”
Pickens offered a humorous allegory about a cowboy with a rattlesnake and wrapped up with a joke about a monkey in tree, both to convey his scorn for the news media.
Baker curiously failed to disclose one key fact about Pickens: He didn't just randomly show up at that 2005 shindig. He had donated millions of dollars to the MRC.
As we documented, Pickens -- who made his money in the oil and gas industry -- gave a $1.5 million challenge grant to the MRC for the creation of its Business & Media Institute. As a result of that donation, MRC vice president Dan Gainor holds the title of T. Boone Pickens Fellow, and in 2011 he attacked ProPublica for investigating the oil and gas industry where Pickens made his millions. MRC chief Brent Bozell considered him an "old friend," devoting a 2011 column to gushing over his charitable donations while hanging out in the plush skybox at the Oklahoma State football stadium he funded through a $165 million donation to the school (while not admitting that the organization he runs has also been a beneficiary of Pickens' largesse). Pickens has also been a longtime meber of the MRC's board of trustees.
The MRC does not do itself any favors when it refuses to hold itself to the same standards of disclosure and transparency it demands from the "liberal media."
