Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center bigwig Tim Graham is such a terrible media critic that his default motivation these days is base hatred of the non-conservative media rather than any legitimate "media research" (not that the MRC actually does any of that).
Thus, an innocuous Washington Post item about a screening of the Dick Cheney-mocking movie "vice" at the Newseum is enough to send Graham into paroxysms of rage. In his Jan. 12 post (in which he bizarrely and inexplicably puts "Newseum" in scare quotes) , Graham has apparently decided to take a hyperbolic, throwaway line in the Post article about how "the showing was attended by what seemed like half the city’s press corps" literally, spending two paragraphs listing all the journalists he could uncover who allegedly attended in addition to blockquoting a paragraph from the Post noting who attended -- and still could only come up with a couple dozen names.
Even then, Graham couldn't get his facts straight. He listed two journalists as working for "Knight-Ridder newspapers"; that company ceased to exist in 2006, when it was bought by McClatchy.
(For Graham's edification, there are thousands of journalists in Washington, while the Newseum appears to have only a couple hundred seats.)
Graham bashed the movie itself (of course) and sneered that the screening was "a natural party for Democrats and the national media -- or, as Chris Plante says, 'but I repeat myself.'"
The fact that Graham gets all ranty over an obviously hyperbolic claim is why nobody outside right-wing true believers trusts the MRC's "media research."
