Topic: Media Research Center
The MRC is not just the Ann Coulter Defense Center -- it's the Rush Limbaugh Defense Center too.
The MRC launched a fusillade against the Associated Press for daring to report Rush Limbaugh's remark that President Obama's health-care plan will "be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care bill," asserting that it was "liberal propaganda to help demonize Rush Limbaugh." MRC chief Brent Bozell also demanded in a letter to AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fouriner that the AP issue "both an apology to Rush Limbaugh and an immediate update to correct the record."
Bozell brought up a two-month-old Fox News article suggesting that Democrats planned to name any health-care bill after Kennedy as evidence that "Democrats themselves who first suggested this naming months ago, not Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative for that matter" and that the AP was negligent.
Nowhere in either the press release or the letter does Bozell quote what Limbaugh actually said.
Fournier caught on to Bozell's spin; according to a NewsBusters post, Fournier replied:
Saying that a bill should be named after Sen. Kennedy is different from saying the bill will be named after the late Sen. Kennedy. (As Rush Limbaugh put it, "Before it’s over, it’ll be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill.")
In that NewsBusters post, Bozell likened the AP article to Phony Soldiers, Part II":
In October 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid led a cabal of liberal Senators in a completely fraudulent attack against Rush fashioned in just the same way - deceitfully taking his words out of context and trumping up a subsequent smear campaign. The left is at it again.
Let's remember the MRC's record of deceitfully taking people's words out of context:
- The MRC patched together several quotes from a book by former New York Times editor Howell Raines to make it falsely appear that Raines was insulting Ronald Reagan. The MRC stood by that for nine years before being forced to issue a "clarification."
- The MRC is still standing by its 2003 Quote of the Year, a statement in a Boston Globe magazine article by Charles Pierce that "Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to [Mary Jo Kopechne] in her old age," claiming that it's ludicrous sycophancy when Pierce himself has pointed out that in context it was meant, and read by non-MRC employees, as harsh criticism of Kennedy.
Seems to us that Charles Pierce is due an apology long before Limbaugh is.
