Topic: NewsBusters
Randy Hall devoted a June 1 NewsBusters post to complaining about a purported "hit job" on Fox News anchor Bret Baier in the Hollywood Reporter arguing that he's not as impartial as right-wingers like to claim he is. Enlisting fellow right-winger Caleb Hull on defense, Hall was particularly unhappy that the article cited "more than a dozen cable news insiders and industry observers" to support its claim, huffing: "Cable news insiders? And because they're anonymous, we don't know if they're from CNN or MSNBC, or disgruntled ex-Fox employees."
Hall then exhibited the Media Research Center's hypocrisy on anonymous sources by further complaining that the supposed "hit job" cited as an example of Baier's bias a claim that the coronavirus originated in a labe in Wuhan, China, that was sourced only by "classified and open-source documents and evidence" that the network did not "directly view" -- in other words, effectively anonymous documents.
But neither Hall nor the Hollywood Reporter cited a more egregious example of Baier's bias: a report before the 2016 presidential election that Hillary Clinton's indictment was imminent -- another anonymous sourced piece that Baier had to retract. If you'll recall, the MRC enthusiastically promoted Baier's bogus story -- so much so that MRC chief Brent Bozell declared that "We will report developments on this continuing cover-up every hour from here on out" -- and never told its readers it was retracted.
If we know anything about the MRC, is that it's so far to the right that its judgment about the political leanings of others is so utterly skewed as to be unreliable. So if Hall is insisting that Baier plays it straight, that really means his conservative bias is quite pronounced.
