Topic: Media Research Center
We've documented how the Media Research Center served as the unpaid (we think) PR agent for the lawyers for the Covington teens in their overheated, greedy $250 million defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post, despite said lawsuit being more of a right-wing manifesto than a credible legal action.
Well, that lawsuit got unceremoniously tossed out of court last month -- and, of course, the MRC whined about the purported injustice.
In a July 27 post headlined "Freedom of Smear," Tim Graham was unhappy that the First Amendment protects opinion: "This is standard First Amendment stuff: the Post is free to report false things to please their liberal readers, and claim that they're the truth."
You know who else has the freedom to smear people? The Media Research Center. And it does that all the time -- most notoriously when Graham's boss, Brent Bozell, called President Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead." Does Graham think Obama should have sued Bozell over that bit of defamation? Unlikely. Does Graham think the MRC should be sued because one of its writers told a delliberate falsehood about CBS it refuses to correct? Even more unlikely.
Graham then moved quickly to whining:But the Post's statement after the victory was obnoxious. "From our first story on this incident to our last, we sought to report fairly and accurately the facts that could be established from available evidence, the perspectives of all of the participants, and the comments of the responsible church and school officials."
This is not true in the slightest. We gave the Post a grade of "Ugly" for its reporting:
The MRC is hardly an objective arbiter of others' reporting, and it has shown an unambigous hatred for everything Post-related.Indeed, one of the purportedly "ugly" things the MRC claims the Post did was that it "published a nasty blog post on 'The Catholic Church’s shameful history of Native American abuses.'" The MRC did not disprove the accuracy of that post, only complain that someone wrote it.
The MRC revels in that "freedom of smear" that Graham purportedly decries -- but only as long as nobody holds it accountable for doing so, even as it demands that others be sanctioned.
