Topic: NewsBusters
Randy Hall frets in a July 24 NewsBusters post that "the liberal media" is checking into "some of the people who appear in Republican campaign advertisements." Hall cites the case of "Jack Gilchrist, a New Hampshire businessman who states that he, his father and his son -- not the government or the President -- built Gilchrist Metal Fabricating." As it turns out, Gilchrist's business was built on state-issued tax-exempt revenue bonds, and he has also received government contracts.
Coleman went on to approvingly cite John Nolte of Breitbart.com questioning whether it was a "priority" for the New Hampshire Union Leader, which first reported on Gilchrist, to be "digging into the personal lives of private citizens who step forward to let their voice be heard."
But that's exactly what NewsBusters approves of when the private citizen in question is a non-conservative.
Remember Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old who was presented by Democrats as an advocate for a federal program called SCHIP, which helps provide health insurance to needy families with children? Conservatives had no problem with digging into the personal lives of Graeme and his family for committing the sole offense of letting their voices be heard.
John Stephenson proclaimed in a Oct. 7, 2007, NewsBusters post: "Media Fail at Fact Checking on 12 Year Old Voice of SCHIP; Blogs Pick Up Slack." He asserted that media accounts of Frost and his family "were missing greatly in one major thing, facts," which apparenly only right-wing attack blogs were able to provide.
In an Oct. 10, 2007, post, Ken Shepherd proudly noted that "conservative bloggers have been raising questions about the portrayal by Democrats and the Baltimore Sun of the family's financial plight," and he criticized media outlets who weren't sufficiently skeptial of Frost's story of peddling "promoting liberal Democratic talking points."
Five days later, Shepherd again touted "conservative blogs raising questions about the Frost family," insisting that "conservative critique has not fallen on young Graeme, but rather his parents and political exploiters (like Olbermann) on the Left who (should) know better."
NewsBusters similarly fretted in May about non-conservative media checking the backgrounds of someone appearing in a Romney ad.
As we've detailed, the Media Research Center's "Tell the Truth" campaign applies only to liberals; it most definitely does not want the truth about conservatives to be told. Here is just another example of that.
