Topic: NewsBusters
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham complains in a Jan. 28 NewsBusters post:
Noah Rothman at Hot Air called out Politico for badly mangling remarks by potential presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. In his new book, Huckabee devoted a chapter to "The Culture of Crude." On Wednesday morning, they tweeted out this attention-grabbing headline: ["Mike Huckabee complains of ‘trashy’ women at Fox News."]
But after clicking through to the article by reporter Adam Lerner, the reader discovered that Huckabee never mentioned Fox, just being in a "professional setting"[.]
Of course, the main reason Huckabee has spent so much time in New York was to shoot his Fox News show, so it's highly logical to assume that he was talking about women at Fox News. Unless, of course, Graham doesn't think Fox News is a "professional setting."
Besides, it can be argued that Politico was simply using the MRC's own journalistic ethics in reporting the story. As we've detailed, the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, insisted in 2005 that Democratic strategist Paul Begala claimed that Republicans "want to kill" Americans when, in fact, the full context of the Begala statement makes it clear that he was saying terrorists -- not Republicans -- want to kill Americans. When Begala called CNS out on its error, then-CNS editor David Thibault (a Republican activist like the intern who originally reported the story for CNS) called Begala a liar. Needless to say, CNS never apologized for its falsehood.
By contrast, the seeming accuracy of the way Politico reported Huckabee's remarks was backed up by how a Fox News host responded to them.
Appearing on Fox News to discuss the remarks (which he denied were targeted at Fox News women), Huckabee found himself on the other end of a mini-lecture from Fox host Megyn Kelly: "Well, I do have some news for you before I let you go. We're not only swearing. We’re drinking, we’re smoking, we’re having premarital sex with birth control before we go to work, and sometimes boss around a bunch of men. ... That's just the reality, Guv."
Curiously, neither Graham nor anyone else at any MRC website has reported Kelly's retort to Huckabee. Apparently, a Fox News host, especially one as reliably conservative as Kelly, deviating from the right-wing script of promoting a persecution narrative -- and, even worse, point out that women behave like human beings -- is simply not news at the MRC.
