Topic: Media Research Center
Apparently, Fox News is not part of "the media" as far as the Media Research Center is concerned.
In a new MRC "special report," Tim Graham attacked "the media spin in the Bush years" and claims that "the media" was "not objective, and it was certainly not independent of liberal partisans, leftist experts and terrorist defense lawyers." Graham makes many sweeping claims (i.e., "Under Bush, anchors and reporters painted the War on Terror as a dark era in American history where our civil liberties were vanishing"), which he illustrates only with anecdotal examples and not any sort of comprehensive analysis. It's reminiscent of Graham's so-called analysis of Huffington Post, in which he cited a mere 19 examples to draw sweeping conclusions about the content of thousands of HuffPo entries.
Graham clearly can't stop shilling for the Bush adminstration, as he attacks reporters for being insufficiently patriotic (translation: they reported bad news about the Bush administration) and played down the Abu Ghraib scandal by huffing that "he networks displayed much greater outrage for U.S. prisoner abuse than for the enemy’s murders."
As with most MRC reports, the scope is deliberately narrow -- it focuses mostly on the broadcast networks, with the occasional appearance of CNN and MSNBC, and Fox News is almost entirely absent. Graham's only mention of Fox News comes on the third-to-last paragraph of his report, which he touts how Fox reported that Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan proclaimed herself to be a 9/11 truther.
To sum up: Graham ignores how the highest-rated cable news network covered the last 10 years of war, serves up only anecdotal clips of the rest, but portrays his report as some kind of comprehensive examination instead of the repackaging of right-wing talking points it actually is.
As we've repeatedly documented, that's how MRC "research" works.
