Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's resident New York Times-hater, Clay Waters, loves to complain that the Times reports accurately on things he doesn't want reported. He does so again in a Jan. 30 post:
The front of Sunday’s New York Times featured David Barstow, known for blessing the paper’s readers with dubious Pulitzer bait every couple of years, tackling the story of authoritarian President Trump’s falsehoods , backed up by liberal good-government types, liberal plagiarist authors, and liberal “fact-checkers”: “‘Up Is Down’: Unreality Show Echoes a History of False Claims.”
[...]
The Times managed to endure eight years of the Clintons (plus Hillary Clinton's email lies) and Obamas, telling fibs about Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky...then Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Obamacare...but only now does the paper decide that we have a lying politician in the White House?
At no point does Waters defend the accuracy of any claim the Times identified as false; all he does is complain that "liberals" identified themand deflect the issue by bringing up irrelevant claims of alleged falsehoods by Democratic presidents when he knows they don't compare with the routine and pervasive lying Trump has done throughout the campaign and into his presidency.
Waters also huffs that "It’s no secret that Politifact, a liberal media creation, presses a left thumb upon the scales of “truth” to make Democrats come out cleaner than Republicans," linking as alleged evidence to a NewsBusters post touting right-wing columnist Mollie Hemingway engaging in pedantic hair-splitting over Planned Parenthood and mammograms.
Waters apparently doesn't realize that fact-checking is not a zero-sum game, or that "liberals" identifying Trump's falsehoods doesn't make them any less false. He's simply playing into his employer's war on facts to give Trump a pass on his lies.
