Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham published a guest post on the CBS News Public Eye blog that offers, according to Graham's promotion of it on NewsBusters, "a small sense of how we answer the questions and critiques we've received over the almost 20 years the MRC has been taping and transcribing and exposing." But it raises a few more questions about the MRC's methods.
Graham makes a surprising admission: that "the great majority of what we watch and read is not noticeably unfair or inaccurate." So taken to its next logical point, this means that the media is not so rife with liberal bias as Graham and his co-workers would have you believe.
Yet, this doesn't stop Graham from making broad overgeneralizations about the media. The most egregious one is the assumption that everyone who works in the media is as liberal and as activist as liberal activist Danny Schechter:
The Danny Schechters of the world, weaned on sixties radicalism, have the network resumes. He’s worked at ABC, at CNN, and made documentaries and series for PBS. Most of us as young conservative journalists never considered sending a resume to these outlets.
This analogy would make a little more sense if Graham could serve up examples of demonstrated bias on the part of Schechter while a network employee. And Schechter's "documentaries and series for PBS" may not even be classifed as news.
Even though the facts don't support the "liberal media bias" meme, Graham supports it anyway. This gives us a little more than a "small sense" of how the MRC operates.
(Full disclosure: I work for that other media research group, Media Matters; I also have a (bad) link to Schechter's MediaChannel.org on the ConWebWatch front page but no other connection to Schechter.)
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:05 PM EST
