MRC Latino Upset That Hispanic Media Is Helping Its Audience Topic: Media Research Center
Ken Oliver-Méndez, head of the Media Research Center's project attacking the Hispanic media for being insufficiently conservative, complains in an Ot. 1 NewsBusters post:
Univision is out with another ad in partnership with the Obama administration. This time, U.S. taxpayer dollars are being spent for Univision morning show weatherwoman Ximena Córdoba to exhort beneficiaries of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to renew the permits exempting them from deportation proceedings for another two years.
“If you are a young undocumented and fulfill the following requirements, you are on time to apply for DACA and obtain your work permit,” says the network’s glamorous weatherwoman, who ticks off the eligibility requirements and points viewers to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website for more information.
Oliver-Méndez insists that this attempt to inform viewers is a "highly questionable expenditure of taxpayer dollars," huffing, "The use of such talent in government ads is considered, with good reason, as compromising both the talent’s and their media outlet’s impartiality and credibility in discussing or reporting on government policies and programs."
Oliver-Méndez also repeats an earlier attack on Univision,claiming that "liberal advocates of ObamaCare were cited nearly five times as often as conservative opponents of Obamacare" but ignoring response to that earlier criticism from a Hispanic media expert who pointed out that Republicans generally refuse to appear on Hispanic media outlets.
Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" handled that earlier criticism, and it applies here as well: "Bastardos! How dare a cable network use its reach to help the audience comply with the law!"
MRC Intern Denounces Opera She's Likely Never Seen Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center intern Tianna DiMartino devotes a Sept. 22 item to ranting about Metropolitan Opera's upcomingh production of the John Adams opera "The Death of Klinghoffer," which she denounces as "disgusting, vulgar, and anti-Semitic." DiMartino sneers at the composer's defense of his opera:
Adams argued that he didn’t write The Death of Klinghoffer to be controversial or provocative and was “appalled at how hot some of the response was” to the opera. He felt he was trying to show the humanity in the civilians and Jewish family on board as well as the terrorists and wasn’t picking sides.
“For all the brutality and moral wrong they,” the terrorists, “perpetrated in killing this man they’re still human beings and have to have had reasons for doing so,” Adams claimed. Seriously? What next? An opera about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and an effort to humanize those terrorists? A tacit justification of their motives?
DiMartino offers no evidence that she has ever seen the opera (or any opera, really) or examined its libretto beyond cherry-picking the most controversial segments out of context by regurgitating the claims of her fellow critics.
As such, DiMartino's attack on Adams botches the truth by ignoring the fact that he didn't write the libretto; Adams wrote music to Alice Goodman's libretto.
In fact, "The Death of Klinghoffer" is a much more emotionally complex production that DiMartino would have you think. Writer Robert Fink examined the issue of whether the opera was anti-Semitic in a 2005 monograph in the Cambridge Opera Journal. He states:
In summary: to call The Death of Klinghoffer anti-Semitic is to claim that it offends because it is an ideologically driven distortion of American Jewish identity, a caricature, ‘agit-prop’, as Rothstein would have it. But looking closely at the opera (and the controversial Rumor scene) in historical context, it becomes clear that theportrayal of American Jews was offensive and upsetting to New York Jewish audiences because it reflected perfectly their worst nightmares about their own conflicted identity as Jews back to them. Beset by Jewish-Gentile hyper-assimilation, the collapse of American–Israeli Jewish dialogue, and the incineration of Black–Jewish multicultural solidarity, American secular Judaism simply did not function anymore. With Klinghoffer, we are dealing not with an anti-Semitic caricature from outside, but a devastatingly accurate insider’s reflection of what Irving Howe sensed in 1989 as anunprecedented ‘deepening crisis in Jewish identity’. Two difficult years later, watching Klinghoffer laid the crisis bare for its New York audience; it was, evidently, akin to standing culturally naked in front of an unflattering music-dramatic mirror.
American Jews did not like what they saw.
Fink added: "This opera does not romanticise terror. It tries for something much more difficult, so difficult that its failure has been splattered for decades over the pages of the American press. The Death of Klinghoffer attempts to counterpoise toterror’s deadly glamour the life-affirming virtues of the ordinary, of the decent man, of small things."
Such examinations of the opera have been around for years -- the opera was first staged in 1991 -- bit DiMartino showed no interest in doing even the most cursory research about it, choosing instead to transcribe what critics were feeding her and adding her own uninformed outrage on top of it.
Apparently, that's all it takes to write for the MRC these days.
At The MRC, The Truth Is A Distraction Topic: Media Research Center
Conservatives had a field day with a picture of President Obama saluting troops with a hand that also held a coffee cup. But when the media. But when some media outlets highlighted a photo of then-President George W. Bush saluting the troops while holding his dog, Kyle Drennen used a Sept. 24 Media Research Center item to cry foul:
Running defense for Barack Obama on Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer touted "some of the President's defenders" pushing back against a video of the commander-in-chief sloppily saluting Marines while holding a coffee cup by "circulating this photo of George W. Bush during his presidency...saluting service members while holding his dog, Barney."
Lauer noted that despite Obama gaffe going viral on social media and "sarcastically being called the 'latte salute,'" it "didn't take long for that photo [of Bush] to come out as well."
The hosts of Today's 9 a.m. ET hour revisited the subject, with Tamron Hall declaring: "President George W. Bush saluted as well in a way that was seen as controversial. He was holding Barney, the dog, there." She observed: "So you have people who don't care for President Obama who say, 'This is so disrespectful!' The supporters of Obama then show the picture of Bush. And then it goes back and forth."
News anchor Natalie Morales chimed in to defend Obama: "He's got a lot – he's got ISIS to deal with, a lot on his mind. So, I – you know, there's a lot more – bigger concerns in the world and we're focusing on a cup of coffee."
Rather then just cover the incident as a gaffe for Obama, the NBC morning show sought to muddy the waters by seizing on a photo of Bush put out by liberal spin doctors and dismiss the whole thing as just another "back and forth" between political partisans.
Funny, we don't recall anyone at the MRC getting their knickers in a bunch when Bush did the same thing Obama did. That's not a distraction or "running defense" -- it's reporting facts.
Drennen's just upset that the media reported the truth, thus proving Stephen Colbert's adage that reality has a liberal bias to be correct yetagain.
MRC's Double Standard on 'The Civil Discourse' Topic: Media Research Center
Sometimes the double standards employed by the Media Research Center are breathtaking in their blatantness.
The latest column from Brent Bozell and Tim Graham is a screed against "The Daily Show," declaring that "time for 'The Daily Show' to be canceled" because "as is so typical of liberals who preach one thing while doing its opposite (Leonardo DiCaprio, call your office), Comedy Central has never felt any responsibility to 'the public discourse.'"
Yeah, like the MRC ever has. Remember when Rush Limbaugh denigrated Sandra Fluke as a slut for daring to talk in public about birth control? Bozell's MRC subordinates were totally down with that, while Bozell himself could muster no criticism of Limbaugh stronger than "Let’s all agree Limbaugh crossed a line," then launched an "I Stand With Rush" website.
On the same day that Bozell and Graham demand the cancellation of "The Daily Show" for offenses to the public discourse, they attack those who call out Limbaugh's offenses to the public discourse.
In a Sept. 24 NewsBusters post, Graham regurgitates Limbaugh's bitter attack on a campaign to dissuade businesses from advertising on Limbaugh's show because of his offenses to the public discourse, regurgitating unsubstantiated claims that the campaign is nothing but "leftist ... agitators trying to ruin his program among advertisers." Graham whines: "Ever since the national Limbaugh show began in 1989, the Left has been eager to 'Flush Rush' and get his show cancelled. Liberals don't really believe in free speech or a vigorous battle of ideas."
Bozell, meanwhile, proves he's even more of a blowhard than Graham, declaring the campaign to be "a blatant left-wing attack on the First Amendment" from "a small handful of hacks trying to intimidate small business owners who advertise on conservative radio." Bozell went on to rant:
The ultra-left's hatred of conservative media and conservative voices is so extreme that they're willing to put mom and pop shops across America out of business to silence them. Hate is the only word to describe what they're doing.
Like Lois Lerner at the IRS, I'm sure Media Matters and Daily Kos believe that the pain and misery they're inflicting on innocent Americans with their war on free speech is justified, but intimidating small business owners with threats and lies is indefensible.
Let's get this straight: Bozell and Graham -- who are nothing if not small-time hacks -- demand the cancellation of "The Daily Show" for offending their conservative sensibilities, then turn around and rant against a group of liberals seeking to cancel the radio show of their right-wing buddy. (Remember, the MRC gave Limbaugh its inaugural "William F. Buckley, Jr. Award for Media Excellence" in 2007.)
Bozell and Graham have demonstrated that they're the ones who don't believe in free speech. Apparently, Bozell and Graham's concerns about preserving "the civil discourse" apply only to liberals -- right-wingers like Limbaugh have free rein to be as uncivil and disgusting as they want.
Like we said, the hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Posted by Terry K.
at 6:34 PM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 6:45 PM EDT
MRC's Graham: Don't Talk About Non-Heterosexuals On Sunday Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham hasyetanother transgender freakout in a Sept. 21 NewsBusters post:
The Washington Post has made it clear that Sunday is not the Lord’s Day. It’s the best day for LGBT preaching. In 2012, they splashed across the front page “TRANSGENDER AT FIVE.” In this Sunday edition, it’s an 18-year-old girl: “WHEN NO GENDER FITS.”
As usual, “the world” is having trouble sympathetically understanding girls who don’t want to be their “assigned” gender. Over a large color photograph of the girl in question tying her own necktie are the words “The world insists, in a host of way, that Kelsey Beckham choose: Male or female? But what feels most right to Kelsey is neither.”
The Post goes all out when it has lessons to teach: splashed across the front page, and then two whole pages inside, with eight color pictures taking up everything above the fold, with the words inside (in caps): “A QUEST TO BE JUST A PERSON.”
There is no space -- none -- for any dissent from the LGBT hard line.
First: We didn't realize it was forbidden to talk about things that didn't relate to heterosexuality on "the Lord's Day."
Second: there is no transgendering going on per se. It's about a biological teen girl who doesn't see herself as either gender. Sexuality is not even discussed in the Post article.
Thrid: It says something about Graham's hatred for non-heterosexuals that he sees someone who's on "a quest to be just a person" to be a "hard line" view. Apparently, he believes any article on a gay or transgender person should be "balanced" by someone like Scott Lively or the Westboro Baptist Church explaining how that person is a deviant and going to hell.
Again: We can't talk about non-heterosexuals on Sunday? Really, Tim?
MRC's Graham Misleads to Obscure Existence of Conservative Media Bias Topic: Media Research Center
As we've previously detailed, the Media Research Center's Tim Graham likes to pretend that conservative media bias doesn't exist. He engages in another game of pretend in a Sept. 17 NewsBusters post.
Graham uses the post not to complain that the new owner of a Washington, D.C., TV station is pushing slanted news coverage but, rather, to complain that it was pointed out:
The Washington Post demonstrated a sudden interest in the political bias of local TV news on Wednesday. WJLA-TV, the ABC station in D.C., was purchased by Sinclair Broadcasting, which is now airing its conservative commentator Mark Hyman in Washington. They warned in a headline, "Under new owner, WJLA airs more conservative content."
Media reporter Paul Farhi organized a parade of horrified liberals – except he didn’t identify any of them as liberals. In large type on the front page of the Style section was Charles Lewis of the leftist Center for Public Integrity: “They are stuck with an idiosyncratic owner with its own political views and agenda. It’s a nightmarish scenario for journalists.”
It’s “nightmarish” if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. But this critique is bizarre. The Center for Public Integrity has left-wing sugar daddies like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar with their own political agendas.
If the Center for Public Integrity is so "left-wing," how does Graham account for the fact that John Solomon served as its director between stints as editor of the right-wing Washington Times? Or that CPI originally funded reporting attacking Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election (for which the work's ultimate publisher, WorldNetDaily, had to apologize for the numerous false claims the work contained)?
Graham also complains:
Farhi’s assertion that WJLA has long been “nonpartisan” flies in the face of the 2010 firing of reporter Doug McKelway for “insubordination” after he reported on a Greenpeace protest calling the group “far left” and noting President Obama received a lot of Big Oil donations.
In fact, McKelway's reporting on Obama's purported "Big Oil donations" was false. As Media Matters noted, McKelway falsely claimed that Obama "accepted $77,051 in campaign contributions from BP" when, in fact, all but $1,000 of that money was from BP employees, not BP itself. And the report itself was not the "insubordination" for which McKelway was fired, as Graham claims; it was a "shouting match" with his boss over the factually flawed segment that prompted the firing.
And where is McKelway working now? Fox News, where he has racked up many more examples of his brand of biased news.
All of Graham's dishonest fulminations are designed to distract from the fact that he refuses to admit that conservative media bias exists.
MRC Plucks Quotes From Roosevelt Documentary Out of Context Topic: Media Research Center
A Sept. 20 NewsBusters post by Jeffrey Lord is devoted to whining that Rush Limbaugh was taken out of context when he lamented that guys can no longer wheedle sex with women by claiming "that 'no' means 'yes' if you know how to spot it." Lord asserts that "Rush has millions of listeners who, yes, actually listen to what he says, understood his context."
As usual at the Media Research Center, however, it's still perfectly fine to take non-conservatives out of context.
In a Sept. 16 MRC item, Kyle Drennen attacks the new PBS documentary on the Roosevelts:
During the first installment of PBS's The Roosevelts: An Intimate History on Sunday, historian Clay Jenkinson and former Newsweek editor turned historian Evan Thomas slammed Theodore Roosevelt as a bloodthirsty "imperialist" who promoted the "glorification of war" and built up a "cult" of personality. [Listen to the audio]
Speaking on Roosevelt's command of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, Jenkinson proclaimed: "There's no question that Roosevelt is an imperialist. Apologists like to try to play this down. But the fact is he's probably the most significant imperialist in American history." Jenkinson seemed troubled by Roosevelt's call for the United States to "take our place in the world's arena."
Minutes later, Jenkinson launched a more pointed attack against the nation's 26th president: "This is really important. There is a blood lust in Theodore Roosevelt. He was a killer. You can't – you can't sanitize that."
Thomas added to denunciation, declaring: "Teddy Roosevelt, although he's a wonderful figure and a glamorous figure, is a dangerous figure in some ways. This glorification of war can't be a good thing in the long run....And it was an illusion that this country from time to time succumbs to."
[...]
The Ken Burns documentary even brought on conservative columnist George Will to scold Roosevelt's belligerency: "Theodore Roosevelt, we should say this bluntly, liked war....And it gave him an unpleasant dimension, which, after a century of war, which the 20th century became, should cause us to look back on Theodore Roosevelt with dry eyes."
But if you look at the transcript Drennen supplies and the accompanying text, it's obvious that Drennen has pulled all of these quotes out of context and fails to fully report what the documentary was saying.
As the full video of the Roosevelt documentary shows, the segment from which Drennen cherry-picks these statements is about Teddy Roosevelt's adventures in the Spanish-American War. The segment starts at 1:20:12; the Jenkinson clip is prefaced with a quote from Roosevelt about "the supreme triumph of war" trumps the triumph of peace and how "it is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness."
There's a 13-minute gap betwen the George Will quote and the second Jenkinson quote Drennen cites, during which it's recounted how Roosevelt was unusually eager to fight the Spanish in Cuba and how his reckless behavior got many of his fellow Rough Riders wounded or killed.
Between the second Jenkinson quote and the first Evan Thomas quote is a short segment about how Roosevelt lobbied to receive a Medal of Honor for his work in Cuba although he was ineligible for one because he was a volunteer. Between the two Thomas quotes is a segment on how Roosevelt's later political career could be traced to his self-proclaimed heroism.
Curiously, for all of his plucking out of context, Drenne never contradicts anything in the documentary. Instead, he whines about Obama for some reason:
It should be noted that Theodore Roosevelt never brought the United States to a war as president and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Unlike Obama, Roosevelt actually earned his peace prize.
Drennen doesn't mention the fact that the part of the seven-part documentary from which he cherry-picked covered Roosevelt's life before coming president. Part 2 of the documentary, which covers Roosevelt's presidency, does cover Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize.
MRC Hides Fox News' Biased Coverage of Benghazi Hearing Topic: Media Research Center
Matthew Balan writes in a Sept. 17 Media Research Center item:
CNN and MSNBC viewers on Wednesday would have to switch channels if they wanted to watch the first hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. CNN aired a 15-second news brief at the top of the 10 am Eastern hour, mere minutes before the nearly three-hour meeting began, but didn't cover the proceedings live. MSNBC set aside 12 minutes worth of segments to the event, and sometimes showed split-screen video, but didn't provide the audio.
By contrast, Fox News Channel provided nearly 41 minutes (40 minutes, 51 seconds) of live coverage of the congressional committee's hearing during the 10 am and 11 am Eastern hours.
What Balan did report: Fox's coverage of the hearing was probably biased.
Media Matters monitored Fox's hearing coverage the previous day and found that the channel emphasized the question from Republican members of Congress while cutting away from questions by Democratic members. In all, Fox devoted twice as much time to Republican questions than to Democratic questions. This is something Fox frequentlydoes, but Balan won't tell you that either.
Balan also won't mention Fox's freakish obsession with Benghazi -- nearly 1,100 segments on it since the incidence occurred in September 2012.
Why? Because Fox's agenda is the MRC's agenda. If Fox is obsessed with Benghazi, Balan must be as well.
MRC Covers For Sharyl Attkisson's Shoddy Reporting Topic: Media Research Center
Now that Sharyl Attkisson has revealed herself to be an anti-Obama conservative-leaning reporter, the Media Research Center has her back, defending her by ignoring the shoddy nature of her reporting.
In a Sept. 15 NewsBusters post, Curtis Houck complained that the networks are providing "zero coverage of news from investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson that aides to Clinton when she was Secretary of State engaged in a weekend meeting that included the removal of documents related to the Benghazi attacks that portrayed her in a negative light." Houck touted how "Attickson [sic] interviewed former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, who stated that the weekend meeting took place in the basement of a room at the State Department and included going through 'boxes and stacks of documents” relating to the attack that left four Americans dead" that pruportedly involved "pull[ing] out anything that might put anybody in the [Near Eastern Affairs] front office or the seventh floor in a bad light.”
P.J. Gladnick followed up with a Sept. 16 post that "Politico reporting on groups of Hillary Clinton supporters who will be defending her during the Congressional Benghazi hearings which makes absolutely no mention of the Sharyl Attkisson's report about how Hillary's aides at the State Department scrubbed the Benghazi documents of possibly incriminating information." Gladnick insists that Attkisson is making "pretty damning allegations" in her "bombshell" story.
What Houck and Gladnick won't tell their readers: Attkisson's source is highly questionable at best. As Media Matters notes, even some reporters at MRC fave Fox News doubt Attkisson's report; Bill O'Reilly, for instance, called Maxwell "a disgruntled former State Department official" who, Attkisson confirmed, didn't actually witness any of the actions he claimed happened.F ox correspondent James Rosen reported that Attkisson's source had previously failed to disclose this accusation of a cover-up and that his account "bears a lot of further investigation before it can be deemed credible."
But these MRC writers somehow trust Attkisson implicitly, even though the MRC has criticized her reporting in the past for promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines. The MRC's cognitive dissonance on Attkisson continues.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Sharyl Attkisson Dissonance Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves the former CBS correspondent's anti-Obama reporting, but it's trying to forget that it criticized her for promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Read more >>
MRC Complains About Coverage Of Speech Obama Hadn't Given Yet Topic: Media Research Center
A Sept. 10 Media Research Center item by Curtis Houck carries the headline "ABC, NBC Ignore Lack of Specifics in Previewing Obama’s ISIS Speech." Houck goes on to write:
On Tuesday night, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir and NBC Nightly News omitted from their coverage any mention that President Obama’s upcoming speech to the country on Wednesday night will not include some crucial details on how he plans to go about defeating the Islamic terrorist group ISIS.
Think about that for a second. The MRC is criticizing coverage of a speech that, at the time Houck's item was posted, hadn't been given yet.
The hook for Houck's item was a claim by CBS' Major Garrett that the speech "appears short on specifics." Still, that's pretty thin gruel, and it shows just how desperate the MRC is to invent any excuse to attack Obama.
Climate Change Misinformation Spreads To Another MRC Website Topic: Media Research Center
One thing about the Media Research Center's multiple web platforms is that it provides more opportunities to spread misinformation. Mike Ciandella writes in a Sept. 2 MRC post:
The same year that former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the Arctic sea ice could be completely gone, the ice has actually reached its highest point in two years. This revelation comes from a report by the Danish Meteorological Institute.
According to the report, which was cited by the British publication the Daily Mail, “[t]he Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row.”
As we documented when fellow MRC employee Tom Blumer parroted the Dail Mail report at NewsBusters, Slate's Phil Plant debunked the Daily Mail's reporting, pointing out that Arctic ice reaching "its highest point in two years" is a meaningless claim given the overall decades-long trend of declining Arctic ice:
Like Blumer, Ciandella makes no effort whatsoever to fact-check the Daily Mail, choosing instead to bash perennial right-wing punching bag Al Gore.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday morning that publisher Katherine Weymouth was stepping down (as Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos is now the owner), and former Politico executive Frederick Ryan is taking her place.
Post technology reporter Craig Timberg implied that the important/interesting part of Ryan’s resume is his “years rising in the Reagan administration, eventually becoming a top presidential aide and key leader in the construction of his presidential library and numerous other initiatives after Reagan left office in 1989.” This, he reports, will “raise questions about the direction” of the allegedly “nonideological” Post:
[...]
Laugh track, please, for the "nonideological" Post. Start with the incessant daily front-page coverage of former Republican governor Robert McDonnell's trial in Virginia right now, for example.
Remember, Graham doesn't think a high-ranking Republican accused of corruption is news.Which must be why the MRC has censored the story of McDonnell's trial.
Graham is being quite disingenuous about a newspaper publisher's politics not mattering because he's conservative. In a May 2012 column, he -- under the pen name of his boss Brent Bozell -- called New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger a "liberal twit." There would be no need to add that modifier to his insult of Sulzberger if politics didn't matter, right?
And the politics of the Post's owner certainly matters to Graham as well. In an August 2013 column, Bozell-slash-Graham wrote that the Graham family, in selling the Post to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, "were confident that he had all the right political values and social liberalism."
Funny how, according to Graham, the liberal politics of media owners always infuses the media the run, while conservative media owners never does. Apparently, Graham has never read the Washington Times or the New York Post.
MRC Thinks Sharyl Attkisson Is A Credible Reporter, Despite Discrediting Her In The Past Topic: Media Research Center
An Aug. 27 Media Research Center item by Geoffrey Dickens carries the headline "Sharyl Attkisson Schools ABC, CBS, NBC on How to Cover the IRS Scandal." He writes:
Unlike her colleagues at the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks, investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, on Tuesday night, actually dug into the finer points behind the big bombshells revealed in the IRS scandal this week.
Dickens appears to have let Attkisson's current mainstream-media martyr schtick blind him to the fact that the MRC's archive shows that Attkisson should not be schooling anyone about anything.
As we've documented, the MRC has repeatedly criticized Attkisson's reporting on the supposed link between vaccines and autism -- something the MRC has conveniently ignored as it promotes her anti-Obama reporting (which it turns out is at least as factuallydeficient as her vaccine reporting).
Dickens appears to think reporters at the "Big Three" networks are Attkisson's "colleagues," but that's simply not true. She left CBS earlier this year and recently signed on to work for The Daily Signal, the "news" outlet of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. An ideologically driven website is hardly the equal of a network news operation.
While Dickens notes that Attkisson issued her "schooling" on Fox Business, he didn't concede that her appearance there is another sign she's moved to outlets friendly to her anti-Obama agenda.
MRC's Gainor Goes To Bat For For-Profit Colleges Topic: Media Research Center
Dan Gainor's Aug. 25 Media Research Center article is a lengthy puff piece masquerading as "media research." He complains:
The Obama administration continues its push to regulate for-profit colleges and national media outlets have joined in and overwhelmingly taken the side of bigger government.
Three top newspapers – The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today – portrayed for-profit education negatively by a factor of 15-1 in roughly three years of news coverage.
The outlets have been laying the groundwork for more regulations, repeatedly painting for-profit education as a problem in need of solutions. The industry has been criticized for “exploitive and fraudulent practices” that “prey on veterans with misleading ads.” The colleges were bashed for their cost, their lobbying and “woefully inadequate education.” Journalists paid little attention to the challenges of educating students that more traditional schools would not accept.
Gainor spends the rest of the article bashing those newspapers for reporting the facts about problems with for-profit schools and ignoring the actual problems.
Gainor attacked the New York Times for covering the issue, complaining that "It even called them 'predatory schools' in April 2014, and 'predatory colleges' in May." Perhaps that's because that's what some of them are. One of the Times editorials Gainor criticized highlighted one analysis finding that "of the 4,420 career programs ... examined, 114 (all at for-profit institutions) had higher loan default rates than graduation rates — a situation created in part by schools that enroll poorly prepared students who can’t do the work but who borrow to pay tuition before eventually dropping out." These schools are "predatory," the Times explained, because they "rely on federal student aid for up to 90 percent of their revenue and are well versed in the art of evading the law."
Gainor went on to portray one for-profit operator, Corinthian Colleges, as the victim of a government conspiracy to run them out of business:
Corinthian Colleges, Inc. was one of the largest companies in the for-profit education field. But government had set out to take it down. It largely succeeded in July 2014.
The Los Angeles Times reported heavily on problems at the Santa Ana, Calif.,-based company – 11 full stories about what the paper called on July 16, 2014, “one of the most problematic players in the troubled for-profit college industry.” The stories featured complaining former students and angry former employees, along with the occasional comment from a company executive.
But Gainor neglects to mention the actual allegations the former students and employees made against Corinthian and outlined in that article. They include predatory marketing practices and falsely inflating placement rates.
Gainor also makes sure to skew his methodology for full propaganda impact:
The Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute analyzed education stories in three top general interest newspapers. The MRC examined USA Today, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The other two papers landing in the top five for circulation are The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. The Journal was not included because it focuses mostly on finance. The Post was deliberately excluded because it had close financial ties with the industry for part of the study period.
Gainor didn't mention that the Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp., which also operates Fox News and, thus, automatically gets a pass. While it's true that the Washington Post did have "close financial ties with the industry" -- until Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2012, its ownership group also ran the Kaplan for-profit schools -- one suspects the Post's coverage of the issue was actually a little too balanced to fit snugly in Gainor's propaganda piece.
The issue of for-profit colleges has been essentially ignored by the MRC until Gainor's piece. That screams of Gainor either being asked, or paid, by the for-profit college industry to write it.
Any chance Gainor will explain what's really behind his sudden interest in the issue? Don't count on it.
Ken Oliver-Méndez, head of the Media Research Center's project attacking the Hispanic media for being insufficiently conservative, complains in an Ot. 1 NewsBusters post:
Media Research Center intern Tianna DiMartino devotes a Sept. 22 
Conservatives 
Sometimes the double standards employed by the Media Research Center are breathtaking in their blatantness.
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham 
A Sept. 20 NewsBusters 
Matthew Balan writes in a Sept. 17 Media Research Center 
Now that Sharyl Attkisson has revealed herself to be an anti-Obama conservative-leaning reporter, the Media Research Center 
An Aug. 27 Media Research Center 
Dan Gainor's Aug. 25 Media Research Center 
