Topic: Media Research Center
In a Nov. 6 Media Resarch Center post, Julia Seymour highlights a Los Angeles Times article about the top 12 political donors in the 2018 midterms, four of whom own media outlets. The top name on the list is a conservative, but Seymour gave him only a short paragraph:
Ranked at the top by that measure were Sheldon and Miriam Adelson who the paper labeled as “ultra-conservative,” are “Republican super-donors” who spent $113 million on the 2018 elections. LAT noted that Adelson purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2015.
Seymour didn't mention that Adelson also owns several media outlets in Israel, which tend to serve as loyal backers of conservative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And in the next paragraph, Seymour downplayed Adelson's media holdings, calling the Review-Journal a mere "city paper" that's "small potatoes" compared to the next person on the list, Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg got two paragraphs, with Seymour claiming without substantiation that Bloomberg's media empire "often promotes the same liberal attitudes as Bloomberg himself, especially on climate change and gun control" -- right after she cites a claim that Bloomberg's media outlets publish 5,000 stories a day in 120 countries. Seymour did not say how many of those 5,000 items a day were "often" repeating Bloomberg's "liberal attitudes."
Further down was "Hillary Clinton supporter" Fred Eychaner, whose media outlets actually are small potatoes compared with even Adelson -- he owns a couple of small radio stations in the Chicago area, but his main media business is in printing newspapers. He gave one-tenth the money that Adelson has.
Finally, there's Jeff Bezos, who Seymour concedes gave even less political money than even Eychaner and all of it to a nonpartisan group dedicated to electing military veterans. But because Bezos owns the MRC-desipsed Washington Post, he comes in for an irrelevant partisan beating:
While their giving may be nonpartisan, the Postleans heavily left. Shortly after Donald Trump assumed the office of president in 2017, the Post introduced a new slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
More recently the paper’s book critic compared Trump voters to “cancer cells,” the paper editorialized that Trump was “complicit” in the destruction that would be inflicted by Hurricane Florence, and a Post political reporter argued “The American people aren’t interested in” the Trump administration's “substantive accomplishments.”
Weirdly, Seymour didn't mention another MRC-despised political donor on the list, George Soros, even though the MRC has spent years ranting about how much money Soros has given to various and sundry media outlets (even though conservative moneybags have spent much more than Soros ever did trying to prop up their failing conservative newspapers).
