Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham's on the Heathering trail again, using a March 15 NewsBusters post to once more bash columnist Kathleen Parker for insufficient adherence to conservative dogma. Parker's offense this time is a column suggesting that the decline of newspapers is linked to demonizing of them by conservative "non-journalists."
In the middle of his anti-Parker rant, Graham drops a curious parenthetical aside: "I’m not a 'non-journalist.' I’m a journalist who writes about journalism. Just because the Washington Post wouldn’t hire me doesn’t mean I’m not a journalist."
Actually, the reason Graham is not a journalist has a lot more to do with the fact that he hasn't had anything to do with actual journalism for decades.
Yes, Graham actually worked in journalism at one time -- according to his MRC bio, he "served as a news reporter for the La Crosse (WI) Tribune and local radio stations in Wisconsin."
But he abandoned journalism for right-wing advocacy in 1986, when he became the editor of a newsletter issued by the right-wing Capital Research Center. And no, his short stint as White House correspondent for Marvin Olasky's World magazine doesn't count since that's an advocacy publication too.
Graham went on to further demonstrate he's not a journalist by asserting "overwhelming evidence of liberal media bias" -- despite the fact that he has previously conceded in 2006 that "the great majority of what we watch and read is not noticeably unfair or inaccurate." Graham further rants:
Parker’s not a conservative. Because a conservative would argue the opposite: that liberal newspapers are a threat to a free society, not conservative media critics. Liberal newspapers are the ones who wanted to make America safe for terrorist suspects. Liberal newspapers are the ones whose coverage of Iraq screamed that they wanted America to fail. Liberal newspapers are fully behind turning America into just another European-style no-growth socialist republic.
If Graham was actually a journalist, he would have offered evidence to back this up. He doesn't. Apparently, he thinks that asserting that there's "overwhelming evidence of liberal media bias" makes it so. It doesn't.
Of course, a real journalist would know that. We know that Graham isn't, and all his assertions to the contrary won't change that.
Besides, would a real journalist be obsessing so much about the ideological purity of others? We're pretty sure the answer is no.
