Topic: Media Research Center
The Washington Post did a big story last month on how Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of TV stations in the country, required its local news operations to run negative stories about Hillary Clinton during the election and worked with Donald Trump's campaign to air interviews with him on those stations.
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham was mad about this, becuase he is a terrible media critic and doesn't think right-wing media should face the same scrutiny as the "liberal media" the MRC pays him to attack. So he ranted about it in a Dec. 25 post:
Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi dug into the Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group to warn of conservative pro-Trump bias. The headline at the top of the Style section front page was “How a giant TV company helped Donald Trump's campaign.” It’s nothing like giant TV companies like, say, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, or (“not for profit’’) PBS. But pro-Trump bias is offensive inside the Post headquarters. The major networks demonstrating a pro-Hillary bias is just favoring compassion, intelligence, and diversity.
A hostile source inside Sinclair leaked internal e-mails to the Post. We can only imagine how much fun it would be to read internal e-mails from the Post (especiallywhen the managing editor was Kevin “I Love Obama” Merida).
Needless to say, Graham offered no evidence that any of those "liberal media" outlets he cited issued "must run" orders from corporate on stories attacking Trump, like Sinclair did for anti-Hillary stories.
Graham also defended Sinclair's softball questions to former presidential candidate and later Trump surrogate Ben Carson: "How does Farhi think these questions are remarkably biased? They might not be hardballs, but they’re not kissing Carson’s ring. They’re bland and open-ended inquiries. It's nothing like Gayle King (from the "giant TV company" CBS) gushing to the Obamas about her favorite Obama inauguration photos."
Graham didn't mention how Farhi rep orted that Sinclair "managers have been particularly close to Carson, who practiced medicine in Baltimore for many years," and "aired his hour-long autobiographical promotional film, called 'A Breath of Fresh Air, A New Prescription for America,' just before Carson’s official announcement [of his presidential campaign]. The Carson infomercial was produced by a company run by Armstrong Williams, which paid Sinclair an undisclosed fee for the airtime."
Neither Graham nor Farhi noted that Williams, who is also Ben Carson's handler, is in business with Sinclair. His Howard Stirk Holdings owns several TV stations that are operated by Sinclair through "sidecar" LMA agreements.
If any of this bias and cozy self-dealing happened with a non-conservative owner of TV stations, Graham would be screaming bloody murder. But Sinclair's bias is the kind of bias he likes.
