Topic: Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media chairman Don Irvine rants in a Dec. 29 AIM blog post:
Looks like a Miami, Florida Barnes & Noble got caught red-handed showing its liberal bias towards some Republican presidential candidates. Especially when it comes to Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Robbie Myers, the digital director for the Senate Republican Conference, spotted Trump’s new book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, along with another Trump book and Carson’s latest, A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties, in the store’s humor section.
Maybe the manager of the bookstore thinks Trump and Carson are just naturally funny guys—they’re certainly funnier than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders—but considering that they are the only books written by any presidential candidates in that section is suspicious at best.
This type of behavior by a bookstore towards Republican or conservative books isn’t anything new, but in the age of social media it’s much harder to get away with it.
Completely lacking from Irvine's post: any evidence that a bookstore employee actually did this. It's much more likely that a mischievous customer put the books there without the knowledge of any employee.
This reminds us of the time WorldNetDaily devoted an actual "news" story to a copy of Hillary Clinton's autobiography being placed in a bookstore's science fiction section. WND credited a "mischievous customer" who "is likely one of the majority of Americans who, according to new national polls, think the New York senator is not being truthful in her new book."
We're guessing Irvine was perfectly fine with that bit of silliness and did not baselessly blame bookstore employees for it, as he is doing here.
And Irvine wonders about AIM's increasing irrelevence in the media-criticism game.
