Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has long tried -- and failed -- to paint Katie Couric as an unrepentant liberal and her stewardship of the "CBS Evening News" as an unrelenting font of liberal bias.
The MRC tries yet again in a new "Profile in Bias" to mark Couric's fourth year at CBS. It begins by citing its own report after her first year -- which, as we detailed, could only come up with a dozen instances of "liberal bias" from 200-plus shows. (Media Matters, meanwhile, found 17 instances of "conservative misinformation" from Couric during the same time period.)
The new report claims to serve up "Katie Couric's top forty most biased quotes from her four years at CBS." That's much less impressive than it sounds -- it amounts to less than one a month.
Actually, it's even less than that, since the MRC is also counting things Couric wrote on her blog or did, other CBS shows, and even a Facebook chat. We counted 12 non-"Evening News" attacks, which makes the instances of alleged "Evening News" bias much closer to one every two months.
For most people, that would be a pretty good record. But the MRC tolerates no deviance from the right-wing agenda, so even just one instance would be sufficient to brand Couric as "liberal."
Of that paltry evidence of "liberal bias," it's unsurprising that some examples are hypersensitive takes. For instance, two entries are questions to President Obama deemed insufficiently hostile. One was simply Couric's repetition of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's statement that Obama is "better at making us smarter than making us angry."
That, apparently, is the best the MRC can do in trying to brand Couric as biased, telling us that its researchers had to seriously struggle to come up with 40 examples.
