Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center joined the right-wing intimidation campaign against ABC reporter and vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz with an Oct. 10 NewsBusters post by Matthew Sheffield highlighting that Raddatz invited Obama to her 1991 wedding along with other then-staffers of the Harvard Law Review, to a man (now-FCC director Julius Genachowski) she divorced six years later.
Sheffield wrote: "Of course, if a Fox News employee hosting a presidential debate were to exposed as having such a relationship with a Republican president, the story would be plastered all over the media and left-leaning journalists would be calling for him/her to be immediately replaced. Clearly this would be a good idea in this case as well."
Sheffield doesn't mention that the last time a debate moderator had a personal relationship with one of the debate participants -- which, it turns out, was even closer than the one Raddatz has with Obama -- the MRC said nothing about it.
CBS' Bob Schieffer -- moderator of a 2004 debate between President Bush and John Kerry -- played golf with Bush in the 1990s, and Schieffer's brother Tom, who Bush appointed as U.S. ambassador to Australia, was president of the Texas Rangers baseball team at the same time Bush was a partner in the team.
Yet we could find no evidence in the MRC's archives that this was ever brought up. Instead, the MRC tried to paint him as anti-Bush; for instance, Tim Graham insisted that Schieffer "tilted left against Bush in 2004" and failed to mention Schieffer's personal relationship with Bush.
Meanwhile, Graham rehashed an earlier hit job on Raddatz, which as we've previously noted consists largely of Graham whining that Raddatz failing to put an anti-Obama spin on the death of Osama bin Laden and falsely suggesting that Raddatz was reporting her personal opinion when, in fact, she was reporting what "one officer's wife" said following Nidal Hasan's massacre at Fort Hood.
