Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to attack the "liberal media" they so despise with childish name-calling. One of the nastiest names they've been tossing around is "whore," whenever news operations promote happenings elsewhere under their corporate umbrella or other reasons:
- Under the headline "‘Christmas Comes Early’ as ABC Whores Out News for Disney+ Push," Scott Whitlock complained in Nobember 2019 that ABC's "GHood Morning America" "devoted almost 17 minutes to shilling for the new Disney+ streaming service. Disney, of course, owns ABC and the journalists on the network sounded more like PR talking points come to life.
- Under the headline "Disney WHORES: ABC Hawks Lion King Prequel, Ignores 28,000 Layoffs," Nicholas Fondacaro ranted in September 2020 about how "NewsBusters has long documented how ABC “News” has whored itself out to parent company Disney to promote its corporate products, everything from their streaming service Disney+ to films like Mulan."
- A Jan. 5 post by Whitlock was headlined "Corporate Whores at Commie China-Loving ABC Actually Cover Disappearance of Jack Ma," attacking the network as "journalists who have spun for their communist China-loving bosses at Disney."
- Under the headline "CBS Goes Full WHORE in Pushing 'Awesome' Streaming Service of Corporate Bosses," Whitlock complained on Feb. 25 that "CBS This Morning journalists promoted the 'awesome' new Paramount+, hyping just how 'excited' everyone was for the newly-named media platform."
- On March 12, the MRC's NewsBusters Twitter account smeared NPR reporter Scott Horsley as "Whore-sley" for not being negative enough about President Biden's coronavirus relief plan.
- On March 18, Fondacaro groused that ABC's "World News Tonight" was "busy suggesting everything was hunky-dory in California by being corporate whores and touting the reopening of Disneyland next month."
This, of course, applies to the MRC as well. If TV networks are "whores" for touting whatever things happening elsewhere, than the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews, is the MRC's whore for promoting MRC initiatives and whatever the Brent Bozell has to say in the form of "news" stories. A few examples since the November presidential election alone:
- Bozell Calls for Investigation Into Media's Election Tampering
- MRC's Bozell: Big Media and Big Tech Stole the 2020 Election
- Bozell to Levin: Survey Shows 4.6% of Democrats Would Not Have Voted for Joe Biden Had They Known Hunter Biden Story
- Poll Shows Media Censorship Cheated Voters of Vital Info, Robbed Trump of Second Term (poll paid for by the MRC)
- Bozell: Big Tech Is Doing What Tyrants Like Hitler, Mao and Stalin Do
- Brent Bozell Slams Facebook for Abandoning Free Speech
- MRC Demands an End to Amazon’s Hate Against Conservatives
- Bozell: ‘The Left-Wing Insurrection Continues in Portland and the Media Yawn’
Also of course, being the MRC, there's a double standard -- nobody is allowed to use such vulgar phrasing to describe right-wingers. In November, Fondacaro ranted that the "insufferably pompous" Tom Friedman claimed that "the Republicans were just a bunch of 'manure' eating racists and whores trying to stir up a Lebanese-style civil war while trying to suppress votes, while President Trump was trying to 'put a bullet into the country.'" Friedman didn't actually use the word as Fondacaro suggested, though he did describe the GOP as "a giant political brothel that basically rents itself out to the night to whoever will energize its base." Fondacaro didn't dispute the accuracy of Friedman's claim, instead content to dismiss him as riding a "crazy train."
Perhaps Fondacaro didn't want to admit that Friedman was correct -- about both the GOP and the MRC.
