Topic: Media Research Center
Scott Whitlock declared in a May 3 item:
Another week, another round of embarrassing corrections from major news media outlets. The Washington Post, The New York Times and NBCNews.com, among others, were forced to retreat on stories saying that Rudy Giuliani was warned by the FBI over Russian disinformation.
[...]
The Washington Post claims “democracy dies in darkness.” Accountability dies with a small update at the bottom of a website few will ever check again.
Of course, correcting the record is accountability, a concept the MRC is unfamiliar with. We would remind Whitlock that his employer has yet to tell its readers that the Fox News story just before the 2016 presidential election that Hillary Clinton's indictment was imminent was false, even as Fox News itself retracted the story.
For all of Whitlock's taking media to task for running a correction, he -- as well as the rest of the MRC refused to give right-wing media outlets the same mocking treatment for the embarrassing corrections they had to make at around the same time. We've already documented how the MRC stealth-edited a post to obscure the fact that Fox News reporter Peter Doocy used a White House press briefing to promote a bogus story from sister organization the New York Post falsely claiming that theBiden White House was giving copies of Kamala Harris' children's book to undotumented immigrant children.
The MRC wasn't done dowmplaying it, though. MRC executive Tim Graham complained in his April 30 column that "On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Trevor Noah mocked the fake news of Kamala Harris’s kiddie book being handed out to migrant children as combining 'immigration, socialism, and reading, the three worst things in the world!'"-- but he didn't tell readers that the "fake news" came from a fellow right-wing media outlet.
That wasn't the only right-wing media screw-up that the MRC would downplay. Fox News had to correct a graphihc that falsely claimed the Biden would mandate that Americans cut 90 percent of meat from their diets, limit consumption to four pounds per year and one hamburger per month. Pretty embarrassing, right? Not according to the MRC, which -- again -- was more mad that the mistakes were called out.
In an April 28 post, Kristine Marsh complained that on an episode of "The View,": "Whoopi Goldberg started off by playing a highlight reel of Republicans discussing a debunked New York Post story alleging minors at a border facility were given Kamala Harris’s book, as well as Fox News issuing an apology for a misleading graphic about the Biden administration wanting to limit meat consumption for climate change. That spurred condescending lectures from the liberal co-hosts about media bias and fake news on the right."
The same day, Curtis Houck whined that MSNBC's Joy Reid "reveled in recent corrections from News Corp-owned outlets despite multiple recent ethical and factual failures from MSNBC and fellow Comcast-owned network NBC," adding, "Reid set the table with the retracted Fox News stories about meat consumption and Vice President Harris’s children’s book at a detention center (and the fact that Tucker Carlson has a show) to argue FNC is a bastion of fake news filled with people who think the coronavirus was never real and the election was stolen."
Graham kept up the whataboutism in a May 8 post, insisting that despite the falseness of the Fox News story, liberals still thinik it's a good idea to eat less meat:
Liberals are having it both ways right now. It's nuts to suggest Joe Biden has a plan to take away your meat. But the eco-lefties really want to limit everyone's meat intake, especially beef. On Saturday night's All Things Considered, NPR host Michel Martin brought on New York Timescolumnist and food writer Mark Bittman for an interview headlined "Food World Ramps Up The War On Meat."
Martin began by explaining "It was falsely suggested multiple times on Fox News and by some Republican members of Congress that President Biden's climate plan will limit red meat eating in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions." But that doesn't mean the left isn't eager for a meat limit.
Graham concluded by complaining that the NPR segment "only considered interviewing leftists who don't like meat-eaters. The meat-lovers didn't get a rebuttal." Graham offered no evidence that any of the people in the segment were "leftists" beyond their saying eating less meat is not a bad idea (which isn't a"leftist" viewpoint).
