Topic: NewsBusters
An April 14 NewsBusters post by Lynn Davidson the "media coverage" (though citing only TV Week and gossip website TMZ) on the new game show Tucker Carlson is hosting displays annoyance that Carlson was described as a "conservative MSNBC pundit and famed bow-tie aficionado." Davidson retorts: "TVWeek didn’t refer to Keith Olbermann as 'famed big-browed liberal.' " This would be relevant if Olbermann was using his apparently abnormally large brows as a way to get media attention, like Carlson did with his bow tie. And to back up her claim about labeling, Davidson dug up a TV Week blog entry from four months ago to support her claim about Olbermann not being labeled "liberal."
Similarly, Davidson also objects to Carlson being called a conservative: "If TMZ were familiar with Carlson and his views, they would know that Carlson thinks we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq and isn’t fond of the choices for 2008, but in any way indicating that those on the right can have diversity of political views would ruin the typical media portrayal of them." Davidson further objects: "TMZ doesn’t label Chris Matthews and Olbermann 'left wing' or 'liberal.' " But as we've pointed out, Matthews has done at least as many non-liberal things as Carlson has non-conservative things. Thus, Davidson failed to follow her own rule about being "familiar with Matthews and his views" before judging his political leanings. But that would ruin the typical conservative potrayal of him.
In a similar vein, an April 13 NewsBusters post by Mark Finkelstein complained that ABC described Larry Elder as a "conservative radio host" even though, he writes, "on his own site Elder describes himself as a 'libertarian' and 'a blend of fiscal conservative and social liberal.' " Finkelstein then adds: "Of course we all know how many times the MSM has described Al Sharpton as a "liberal" in the course of his innumerable appearances over the last week or so: that would be precisely zero, at last count."
Since Finkelstein, per Larry Elder, has set website self-description as the standard by which the media should describe someone's political leanings, let's look at Sharpton's online bio. Hmmm ... nope, we don't see the word "liberal" anywhere.
While we're at it, let's look at Keith Olbermann's online bio. Nope, no "liberal" there either. Or "left-wing" for that matter. Sorry, Lynn.
