MRC Complains Media Not Reporting Irrelevent Detail on Teachers Strike Topic: Media Research Center
Scott Whitlock complains in a Sept. 10 Media Research Center item:
All three morning shows on Monday covered the massive teachers strike in Rahm Emanuel's Chicago that left 350,000 students in the lurch. However, only CBS This Morning explained that the teachers, through their public sector unions, are already well compensated, making an average salary of $71,000 a year (plus benefits).
Whitlock might have a point if salary issues were a primary reason for the strike.But they're not.
As the Washington Post reports, teachers and city officials are near an agreement on salaries. More prominentreasons for the strike are personnel issues such as an evaluation system teachers call punitive, smaller class sizes, and air conditioning for classrooms that don’t currently have it.
Given that salaries aren't a major bone of contention, there is no reason to report what current average salaries are -- unless media outlets want to emulate the MRC's right-wing agenda of punishing teachers for joining a union.
MRC Hates It When Paul Ryan Is Fact-Checked Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has never thought that its "Tell the Truth!" campaign should apply to fact-checks of conservatives, and it's proven that yet again.
Clay Waters complains in a Sept. 7 MRC TimesWatch item that the New York Times "devoted a full story to probing" Paul Ryan's "claim to have run a super-fast marathon," dismissing it as a "silly atheletic-related controversy" and "partisan-slanted 'fact-checking.'" In Waters' mind, it seems, only "partisan" fact-checkers hold conservatives accountable.
Noel Sheppard brought his hackishness to the issue in a Sept. 9 NewsBusters post, declaring that the marathon in question happened " 22 years ago," huffily adding: "Our nation is struggling with stubbornly high unemployment and spiraling budget deficits that threaten our very existence, and O'Donnell spent time quizzing the Republican vice presidential nominee about his marathon time when he was in college."
MRC Can't Stop Taking Obama Out of Context Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center takes its deliberate misrepresentation of President Obama's "you didn't build that" remark to new heights of lameness by sending videographer Dan Joseph to a street festival in Charlotte and asking vendors if they got any governmnet help in building their businesses.
Needless to say, Joseph never fully identifies himself as a partisan right-winger to any of the vendors he's ambushing, and he includes the deceptively edited "you didn't build that" clip of Obama.
And, thus, the MRC continues its work as the media arm of the Mitt Romney campaign.
MRC Keeps Up the Hypocrisy on Taking People's Words Out of Context Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center lets its hypocrisy on taking people out of context show again.
A Sept. 1 NewsBusters post by Rusty Weiss carries the headline "Liberal Media Takes Quote Completely Out of Context to Paint Romney as Out of Touch." Weiss complained that a quote of Mitt Romney telling Hurricane Isaac victims could "go home and call 211" "has been taken grossly out of context."
But the MRC complains only when conservatives and Republicans are taken out of context and actively works to take liberals, and especially President Obama, out of context -- most recently Obama's "you didn't build that" remark.
That happened again in an Aug. 29 MRC TimesWatch item by Clay Waters that ridiculed a New York Times writer for doing what Weiss did -- put words in their proper context.
Waters complained that the Times writer accurately described Obama's remarks as being "selectively edited" by Republicans and that Obama was actually talking about "roads and bridges." Waters responded by playing the grammar card he has previously played: "If eloquent Obama meant 'roads and bridges,' why did he employ the plural 'those' instead of the singular 'that'?"
Slate's David Weigel has previously shot down the grammar-police argument, which requires, yes, putting Obama's words in their full context.
MRC Misleads on GM Plant Closing, What Obama Said About It Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has its Republican marching orders on criticism of Paul Ryan's claims about the General Motors plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wis.: 1) The plant closed in 2009, not 2008, and 2) President Obama promised to keep it open. Both claims are either misleading or false.
Here's how the MRC has forwarded these talking points:
An Aug. 30 NewsBusters post by Matt Vespa asserted that "the plant closed in June of 2009" and that "Obama promised to keep the plant open, but then shut it down."
An Aug. 30 post by Ken Shepherd asserted that "assembly line operations ceased in the spring of 2009," citing a Janesville Gazette article stating that "about 100 employees" were still on the job at the time. Shepherd also declared that "campaigning on hope and change, then-Sen. Obama optimistically held forth that a government bailout would save the Janesville plant. Alas, the government bailed out GM, but GM didn't save the plant from being shuttered."
An Aug. 30 CNSNews.com article by Matt Cover declared: "Ryan is in fact correct. The Janesville GM factory stopped production of SUVs in December 2008 and closed its doors for good in 2009 – less than one year after Obama promised to keep it open for another hundred years."
An Aug. 31 MRC item by Kyle Drennen asserted that Ryan made an "accurate claim that President Obama promised to keep open a GM plant that closed in 2009."
All of these writers take great pains to ignore the fact that the vast majority of the plant was shut down, and the vast majority of its workers laid off, in December 2008 -- before Obama took office. From the Janesville Gazette article that Shepherd cites:
SUV production ended in Janesville on Dec. 23, a little more than five months after the plant lost a second shift of production.
More than 2,000 hourly and salaried GM workers were laid off as a result of the production cuts. Supplier companies laid off another 1,200 people.
The plant's main purpose was to build SUVs. That line shut down in December 2008, laying off nearly all of the 2,000 workers hired by GM to build them. The 100 or so employees who remained between December 2008 and mid-2009 were not building SUVs for GM but, rather, medium-duty trucks for Isuzu under contract with GM. Thus, the plant was, for all intents and purposes, closed in December 2008. It's dishonest for the MRC to take a binary approach by insisting that because a handful of workers remained until 2009, Ryan is correct to claim that the plant was "open."
CNS' Cover did concede that "the Janesville plant shut down the majority of its production in December 2008," but it's buried in the second-to-last paragraph of his article, and it comes several paragraphs after his assertion that "Ryan is in fact correct."
On the second point, Obama never actually promised to keep the plant open. As PolitiFact points out, Obama "had pledged to help keep the Janesville plant and others like it 'viable.' That's not quite the same thing as pledging keep the Janesville plant open."
Shepherd tried to skirt that, claiming that "Ryan did not directly blame the plant's closing on President Obama."
The MRC also largely ignored the fact that Obama made his statement in February 2008, but GM didn't announce that the plant would close until June 2008 -- again, before Obama became president.
Further, as former auto czar Steve Rattner noted, the auto companies that were bailed out by government -- not the government itself -- decided which plants stayed open:
“In this case the government, we aren’t really equipped to make those decisions,” he said. “We go to management and say, ‘Give us a plan, show us what you’ll do and what your business will look like.’ We look at the numbers and say whether we think it works, or if it needs more or fewer plant closings. But beyond that we have no expertise to decide whether a plant in Janesville should be kept open versus one in Wilmington, Del., or Tennessee or anywhere else.”
No MRC item mentioned Rattner's statement.
UPDATE: NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard joins the misleading parade in a Sept. 3 post, declaring that "if the plant remained open 'through late spring 2009,' Ryan's right." Sheppard quotes only from a quick summary debunking the claim by Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, ignoring a more detailed piece by Kessler pointing out that "The plant was largely closed in December 2008 when production of General Motors SUVs ceased — before Obama was sworn in."
MRC's Latest Freakout: A Skittles Ad Topic: Media Research Center
Earlier this week, the Media Research Center freaked out over an androgynous male model. Now, it's a candy commercial.
An Aug. 28 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr uncriticially repeats the claims of the right-wing American Family Association's One Million Moms about the alleged offensiveness of a commercial for Skittles candy "that features a young woman french kissing a walrus." Starr writes that the group argues "it is 'irresponsible' for Mars and Wrigley to make an ad of this kind that promotes a product used by children."
But neither Starr nor the AFA offer any evidence that the commercial was targeted at children -- after all, children aren't the only people who buy Skittles. Nor do they explain why all ads for everything, even products not for children, apparently must be dumbed down to a child's level.
The MRC wasn't done with the manufactured outrage, however. MRC chief Brent Bozell's Aug. 31 column also references the Skittles ad, insisting without evidence that "the ad is targeted to children." Bozell goes on to whine that "this is a thoroughly bizarre way to sell candy to children," adding that "upsetting people who protest indecencies to children doesn't bother them at all."
Again, no MRC employee has offered evidence that this ad was targeted to children -- the one thing that would make this something other than a manufactured controversy from a pair of right-wing groups peddling professional prudery.
The MRC Declares War on Androgyny Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Philbin uses an Aug. 27 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute item to rant about how Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams praised a Japanese Toyota commercial featuring an androgynous male model:
Sound creepy? Not to Williams. This, she wrote, is “the changing way gender is portrayed in advertising.” The model “represents a new understanding that gender isn’t always neatly defined, and that if a man can be alluringly beautiful, that shouldn’t be anything to be laughed at or scared of.”
Unfortunately, we Americans aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate what Williams asserted was “definitely an idea worth sharing.”
“Why is the ad not running in America?” she asked. “No doubt because it would immediately gay indoctrinate all our menfolk and then there would never be any more babies made and Mitt Romney would never become president.”
That, of course, is exactly the mocking nastiness that greets any conservative critique of the “queering” of mass culture.
Actually, such conservative critiques are, if anything, more mocking and nasty than the response. Philbin helpfully provides an example:
In 2011, the Culture and Media Institute caused a media firestorm by pointing out that clothing manufacturer J.Crew’s marketing materials featuring the company president painting her young son’s toenails hot pink was a nod to the gay agenda.
Philbin, like the CMI piece he's referencing, is making the entirely unsubstantiated assumption that pink on a boy automatically equals "gay agenda" when it may just be that the kid's a 5-year-old who likes bright colors.
Philbin never explains why gay people, perceived or otherwise, are not allowed to be depicted in advertising, but he's on an anti-gay roll:
That agenda is advancing. No TV show is complete these days without a gay character or storyline. Gay activist group GLAAD is in a committed relationship with CNN. GM recently began its own campaign marketing to American gays.
So companies shouldn't try to make money by marketing to gays? Really?
Remember, the MRC has an anti-gay agenda, and apparently all androgynous people are guy, so they must be denounced too.
NEW ARTICLE: A Cog In The MRC's Anti-Gay Outrage Machine Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Hadro's job at the Media Research Center involves getting upset every time a gay person appears on CNN. Read more >>
MRC Spending $300,000 Preaching To the Choir At RNC Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is dropping some serious coin to promote its anti-media message at the Republican National Convention. From an Aug. 27 CNSNews.com article by Pete Winn:
From now until Sept. 2, the media watchdog group, which is the parent organization of CNSNews.com, has rented three 14 ft- by-48 ft. billboards along Route 60 -- the primary road running from the Tampa airport to the convention site, the Tampa Bay Times Forum.
In addition to the billboards, a plane will fly a 40 ft.-by-80 ft. aerial banner around the city, weather-permitting, and a mobile billboard truck with the same slogan will drive around the Tampa area displaying the slogan.
High-powered projectors will also shine night-time projections with the message onto buildings surrounding the downtown convention site. And "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" buttons, bumper stickers and signs will all be handed out around the outside of the convention hall, according to MRC Marketing Director Ed Molchany.
The $300,000 Tampa campaign is part of an overall $5 million “Tell the Truth 2012” campaign that MRC President L. Brent Bozell III announced in January, during the New Hampshire primary.
Does the fact that the Media Research Center has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get its message out to a highly targeted audience that should theoretically already be receptive to it indicate the weakness of that message? If the MRC thinks so, it certainly won't say so in public.
Winn's boss, Brent Bozell, is quoted as making this curiously worded statement:
“Our goal is not--and I underscore this--our goal is not to do what they do, which is to attempt to elect or defeat a candidate," said Bozell. "We want a level playing field. We want the rules to apply to both sides. If you are going to have hard-hitting investigative reporting on one side, perfect. Then have hard-hitting investigative reporting on the other.”
Bozell has to say that the MRC's efforts are not intended "to attempt to elect or defeat a candidate" -- the MRC would be violating its 501(c)3 nonprofit status if Bozell wasn't tossing out that disclaimer and keeping up the pretense that it's not an arm of the Republican Party and the Romney campaign.
However, Bozell is simply lying when he says that "we want the rules to apply to both sides." The MRC has never applied the same rules to, say, Fox News that it applies to the "liberal media." And the MRC's "Tell the Truth!" campaign is hostile to media outlets that tell the truth about conservatives.
Another MRC 'Special Report' That Isn't Topic: Media Research Center
the Media Research Center's longhistory of not-so-special "special reports" continues with an Aug. 8 "special report" by Tim Graham and Geoffrey Dickens, "The Media's Obama Miracle," in which they complain about the "the stunning lack of coverage" of certain Obama administration "scandals" in the media (well, only "the morning and evening news shows" on network TV). But really, they're just complaining that the media isn't parroting right-wing anti-Obama talking points.
Graham and Dickens write:
In the first two months of 2002, the Big Three networks reported a stunning 198 stories on the Enron bankruptcy, often tying the fiasco to President Bush. By comparison, since declaring bankruptcy on August 31, 2011, despite a half-billion dollars in federal loans from the Energy Department through Obama donor connections, ABC, CBS, and NBC filed a grand total of 24 stories on Solyndra, and barely connected it to Obama -- even as Obama told ABC he had no regrets, and even as the promise of “green jobs” demonstrably collapsed.
As we pointed out the last time the MRC did this, that's a ridiculous comparison. Enron was a huge company using impenetrable and deceptive accounting methods to obscure massive corruption and market manipulation, and its bankruptcy was the largest in history at the time. Solyndra was a small company making solar panels that fell victim to a change in the market -- a rival method of building the panels suddenly became much cheaper than Solyndra's -- and nobody has accused Solyndra of Enron-level fraud or corruption.
The authors continue with a little conspiracy mongering:
Federal agents twice raided the plants of Gibson Guitar in Tennessee to investigate whether they improperly imported wood from Madagascar and India, but waited for almost a year before settling with the guitar maker for a $300,000 fine. No one found it newsworthy that Gibson’s CEO is a Republican donor, while other guitar makers who weren’t Republicans were not raided by the government over wood imports.
Perhaps that's because the other guitar makers weren't breaking the law. As NPR reports, Gibson continued to import wood from Madagascar despite knowing the risk that it might be improper to do so. In settling the case, Department of Justice officials said that "Gibson has acknowledged that it failed to act on information that the Madagascar ebony it was purchasing may have violated laws intended to limit overharvesting and conserve valuable species." Do Graham and Dickens think Repubicans should be above the law?
As for the rest of Graham and Dickens' so-called Obama "scandals"...
MRC Claims It's Irrelevant That Akin, Ryan Voted The Same on Anti-Abortion Bills Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Clay Waters is desperately trying to ignore reality on the Todd Akin controversy.
In an Aug. 23 MRC TimesWatch item, Waters complains that the New York Times is "trying to change the subject from the bad economy to social issues, for Obama's sake" by trying to "tie controversial comments by Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin to Mitt Romney's running mate Paul Ryan."
How far in denial is Waters? He huffs that the Times "irrelevantly noted that Paul Ryan and Todd Akin voted the same way" on several anti-abortion bills. How is that irrelevant? Waters never explains. Inconvenient to Waters' right-wing agenda? Sure. But hardly irrelevant.
This appears to be another example of the MRC violating its own "Tell the Truth" mantra by attacking anyone who dares to do so about conservatives.
Soros Derangement Syndrome Watch Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has another fit of George Soros derangement in an Aug. 21 Business & Media Institute item by Julia Seymour complaining that news reports on Soros Fund Management's purchase of a minority stake in the Manchester United soccer team "excluded any indication of Soros’s politics or his controversial history."
Seymour doesn't explain why Americans should care about Soros' politics in a story about his buying a stake in a British soccer team.
Seymour went on to complain about "allegations of racism among the media when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh was part of a group making a bid to buy the St. Louis Rams pro football team," adding that some media outlets "repeated fake quotes about slavery attributed to the talk show host that eventually forced Limbaugh his attempts [sic] to buy the Rams." Seymour doesn't mention the racially charged statements Limbaugh has made that are undeniably true.
Seymour's boss, Dan Gainor, is obsessed with attacking Soros.
MRC Doesn't Want Media to 'Tell The Truth' About FRC 'Hate Group' Designation Topic: Media Research Center
Despite its "Tell the Truth!" mantra, the Media Research Center just hates it when the truth is told about conservatives. And so it is with the Southern Law Poverty Center's designation of the Family Research Council as a "hate group" for its anti-gay activism:
In an Aug. 20 NewsBusters post, Matt Hadro grumbled that "CNN gave more credibility to the SPLC" for reporting the FRC's designation as a hate group. But Hadro can't even argue a lack of balance; he concedes that CNN "aired the FRC's Tony Perkins lashing out at the SPLC for their "reckless" use of the 'hate group' label."
In an Aug. 20 MRC Culture & Media Institute item, Lauren Thompson huffed that "pro-LGBT organizations ... still openly refer to Family Research Council as a 'hate group.'"
Neither Hadro nor Thompson offered any evidence that would contradict the SPLC's designation. That tells us that the SPLC is accurate, and the MRC can't handle the truth.
The MRC was similarly upset last week at the Huffington Post for reporting the undisputed fact tha the SPLC called the FRC a "hate group."
MRC Strains to Prove Debate Moderators Are Biased Topic: Media Research Center
Not even Brent Bozell could give Newsmax any evidence that the moderators named for the presidential debates this fall have a "liberal bias." So it's no surprise that Bozell's group, the Media Research Center, is similarly failing to prove the claim.
Tim Graham gives it a try in an Aug. 14 NewsBusters post going after ABC's Martha Raddatz. But mostly, he whines that Raddatz reported news that Graham would rather not see reported.
Graham actually complains that Raddatz called the drone killing of "American citizen/radical terrorist" Anwar al-Awlaki "Another huge victory in the War on Terror." Why? "These are words ABC never used in the Bush era," Graham asserts. Graham was also annoyed thatRaddatz portrayed a historic event -- the end of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy -- as a historic event.
Graham is even upset that Raddatz reported what other people say, complaining that Raddatz reported the opinion of "one officer's wife" following Nidal Hasan's massacre at Fort Hood, "I wish his name was Smith." Graham suggested without evidence that this was Raddatz's personal opinion.
Graham sneered in an Aug. 15 NewsBusters post that CNN's Candy Crowley "fits within the CNN media-elite mold of liberalism ," whatever that means. Graham certainly doesn't explain. But even as he's smearing her as an "affirmative action" pick, Graham has to concede that she's a balanced questioner:
Affirmative-action lovers were thrilled that CNN's Candy Crowley would be the first female to moderate a presidential debate since Carole Simpson's sneering turn in 1992. Crowley deserves the opportunity after being in the field of political news for decades, and is the closest thing the current crop of moderators has to a Tim Russert type in being able to question firmly both sides of the aisle.
Nevertheless, Graham fills out his blog post with cherry-picked quotes purportedly demonstrating Crowley's "more liberal moments."
Oh No! It's MRC vs. Devo Topic: Media Research Center
In an Aug. 16 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute item, Ryan Robertson responds to Devo's new song about Mitt Romney's dog, which was infamously strapped to the roof of his car, not by critiquing the song but by attacking the band.
The headline of Robertson's article calls Devo "pop has-beens," while the article begins, "It’s kind of sad, really – a novelty pop band with a lone hit 30 years ago trying to make political hay of an incident of about the same vintage."
Dismissing Devo as noting but "a novelty pop band with a lone hit 30 years ago" shows a serious (though unsurprising) lack of musical knowledge on Robertson's part. According to Allmusic, Devo's first album was "one of the first pop albums to use synthesizers as an important textural element," and it "revived the absurdist social satire of the Mothers of Invention, claiming punk rock's outsider alienation as a home for freaks and geeks."
Further, according to Allmusic, the band's founding concept of de-evolution -- the idea that instead of evolving, mankind has actually regressed -- was informed by one band member witnessing the deadly National Guard shootings at Kent State University. Devo dramatized conformity, emotional repression, and dehumanization in order to attack them, not to pay tribute to them.
And Robertson's dismissing Devo as "pop has-beens" is ironic given that his employer has given a regular column to a musical has-been who hasn't had a hit in at least as long, Charlie Daniels.
Matt Philbin uses an Aug. 27 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute 
