Speaking of Overwrought Hatefests...
Topic: Media Research Center

Under the headline "An Overwrought Hatefest at the Emmy Awards," Brent Bozell and Tim Graham spent their Sept. 22 column ranting about, yes, the Emmys, declaring it "a boorish hourslong festival of Trump bashing and Hillary mourning" and a "screaming political spectacle."

The day before that column appeared, however, Bozell and his Media Research Center held their very own overwrought hatefest in the form of the 30th Anniversary Gala and DisHonors Awards. It had a theme (of a speakeasy) as if it was a high school prom, and it was held at a grand building that, ironically for the government-hating right-wingers at the MRC, owes its existence to the federal government.

How hateful was it? One of its so-called awards was given to literally "Every Single Person We Don’t Like in the Liberal Media." And anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel was on hand to sneer, "President Donald Trump is living at the White House, while Hillary is at Costco signing books in the milk aisle." (Though Hillary sold more books last week than Gabriel ever has.)

Nevertheless, the MRC thought its hatefest was so entertaining that its "news" division, CNSNews.com, devoted three entire articles to Joe Piscopo's routine there (which didn't seem all that funny or original -- but then, conservatives don't demand that their humor be funny, just conservative).

Of course, there was not a word breathed about the award the MRC didn't give out: The "Williiam F. Buckley Award for Media Excellence" that was to be given to Sean Hannity but withdrawn after the award was challenged by Buckley's son, presumably opposed to Hannity's irresponsible and un-Buckley-like conspiracy-mongering. The only thing the MRC ever said about it was a single tweet from Bozell claiming a scheduling conflict; but as former MRC employee Ken Shepherd noted, Hannity hosted his regular Fox News show as usual that night.

The MRC definitely knows how to throw an overwrought hatefest to rival the Emmys. If only they'd simply admit that's what they're doing.

MRC's Hypocritical Attack on Coverage of Puerto Rico
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Nicholas Fondacaro huffs in a Sept. 25 post:

Hurricane Maria hit the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico last Wednesday and since then, there has been an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis. Most of the island was still without power, supplies slow to arrive, and the threat of a failing dam as of Monday. Despite the terrible news coming from the island, the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) have dedicated far more time since Sunday to President Trump’s spat with protesting athletes than to the Puerto Rican people fighting to stay alive.

Between September 24 and September 25, the Big Three Networks spent a total of 92 minutes and 33 seconds of airtime hyperventilating about Trump's feud with various sports athletes. Compared to the 25 minutes and 45 seconds of total airtime between the three for Puerto Rico, over those two days. That means the networks spent 3.6 times more airtime on Trump’s Twitter war than the humanitarian crisis.

Again, the MRC has chosen to focus only on TV networks with a limited amount of news space, completely and deliberately ignoring the cable news channels (after all, that ratio probably occurred at its beloved Fox News as well).

The big problem here, though, is the utterly hypocritical nature of the criticism. Because you know who else prioritized Trump's NFL spat over the crisis in Puerto Rico? The MRC.

At the same time Fondacaro's post went live, the front page of the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, contained 13 stories, columns and blog post and Trump's NFL spat, seven of which were at the top of the page -- with the lead story being MRC chief Brent Bozell's own NFL-bashing rant:

At the same time, there were no stories on its front page -- none -- about Puerto Rico. Indeed, the first article about Puerto Rico at CNS wasn't posted until a day after the MRC's so-called study was issued -- and it was a column from the Heritage Foundation whining that "American workers and businesses will not be able to play a major role in the reconstruction unless President Donald Trump overrules the Department of Homeland Security and issues an extensive waiver from the commerce-killing Jones Act." That was followed an hour later by a stenography piece by Melanie Arter in which Trump declares that the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico are going well.

Neither article offered anything more than a glancing mention of the growing humanitarian crisis in the country.

The MRC is criticizing the media for doing the exact same thing its own "news" outlet is doing. That's the height of hypocrisy.

No, MRC, Levin Isn't Vindicated on Spying Claims
Topic: Media Research Center

Craig Bannister harrumphed in a Sept. 19 CNSNews.com blog post:

In March, conservative pundit Mark Levin documented that the Obama Administration had wiretapped the Trump campaign. On Monday, CNN reported that, indeed, the FBI had wiretapped former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, both before and after the election.

But, while CNN’s claim is based on unnamed “sources,” Levin made his case by citing quotes from eight separate news reports [...] to make the case that the Obama Administration spied on Trump.

At the Media Research Center's NewsBusters, Tim Graham insisted that CNN's revelation about the FBI wiretapping Manafort "means there are some major-media reporters who should apologize to conservatives who asked questions about Trump-team surveillance. In March,ABC’s Brian Ross repeatedly denounced Mark Levin as a 'conspiracy-loving talk show host' (a la Alex Jones) over three days of newscasts." Graham added that HBO host John Oliver "should also get Levin on the phone and apologize."

Levin's claims reportedly inspired Trump's assertion that Trump wiretapped him. But the truth is not necessarily on Levin's (and the MRC's) side.

As the Washington Post points out, the target was Manafort, not Trump. He was being monitored as early as 2014, many months before Trump had even announced his presidential campaign, and he was apparently not monitored during the brief time he was the manager of the Trump campaign. There is, however, no evidence that Obama personally ordered it, as Levin has suggested.

Three's no need for anyone to apologize to Levin just yet. There is, however, a fairly urgent need for the MRC to explain the details of its business arrangement with him so that we know how much Levin is paying it to promote him.

MRC Seems OK With Violence Happening To Journalists Who Don't Like Trump Enough
Topic: Media Research Center

Last year, we argued that the Media Research Center's attacks on NBC reporter Katy Tur helped to prime the pump for Donald Trump's attacks on her during the campaign, which resulted in concerns about her safety as Trump supporters became increasingly hostile toward her and other journalists.

It seems that fear is the preferred state in which the MRC would journalists to remain.

In a Sept. 12 MRC post, Kyle Drennen wrote dismissively of Tur's legitimate fears of violence against her and other journalists:

Promoting her new book about covering Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, on Tuesday’s NBC Today, correspondent Katy Tur told co-host Matt Lauer that the then-presidential candidate’s public criticism of her reporting was “jarring” and “scary.” Lauer shared her fear as he recalled the “intense feeling” he got at Trump rallies when the Republican nominee would attack the liberal media.  

[...]

Tur responded: “At first, he was very charming. And when he realized that his charm wasn’t going to change my reporting, he would go on the attack....What I did every day though...was go out and try and honestly report on what was happening and hold him accountable for the things that he said.”

Lauer continued to paint Tur as the victim: “You said you kept a diary. I would love to go back and read the entry in the diary on that day that he called you ‘little Katy Tur’ and you were ‘dishonest’ and things like that.” Tur melodramatically declared: “Well, that is in the book. And you can go back and read exactly what it felt like in that moment. It was jarring, it was scary, and it was one of those feelings that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake.”

The morning show host commiserated with her: “Yeah, I was at a few of his rallies when he would target the press. And although he never mentioned me by name, I do remember the entire room turning around and looking at the press pool....And it was a very intense feeling.”

Tur breathlessly explained: “We had to have armed security. And it wasn’t just NBC, it was the other networks as well. I think everyone except for Fox and CBS. The crowd would all – they would turn on us and they would yell. And he riled them up to do that.”

She clarified: “I’m not saying Donald Trump’s supporters were violent, angry people. Many of them were lovely and wonderful when you talked to them one-on-one.” However, Tur then warned: “The concern was what if there’s one person in that crowd who might take this too seriously? Who might feel like this is not just a show or part of the act and take it further.”

Earlier in the segment, the reporter laughably claimed that her lack of experience in political reporting before being assigned to cover Trump’s presidential run actually made her a fairer journalist:

[...]

In reality, throughout the campaign and in the first year of the Trump administration, Tur has consistently been on the attack. Back in February, she even suggested that the President’s criticism of the press went down a “dangerous path” that could lead to “suspicious deaths of journalists.”

That last link goes to a February MRC post in which Nicholas Fondacaro declares that her fears of violence against journalists are "vile," huffing that "It’s reporting like this that helps to create the circumstances for the violent rhetoric we’re seeing from the left, such as Madonna talking about blowing up the White House and Sarah Silverman calling for a military coup." Interesting that Fondacaro thinks reacting to the anti-media atmosphere Trump creates is "vile," but not the actual creation of it.

(We could find no reference to anyone at the MRC being similarly offended when a writer for Newsmax called for a military coup against Obama.)

Drennen followed up the next day by seemingly justifying threats of violence against Tur because she doesn't like Trump:

“The room goes wavy. My stomach churns. I can feel the bile in the back of my throat.” That reaction to Donald Trump winning the 2016 election didn’t come from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, it came from the pages of NBC correspondent and MSNBC anchor Katy Tur’s book about covering the campaign.

The Hill’s Joe Concha read through a copy of Unbelievable, in which Tur bemoaned Trump’s victory: “I’ve heard him insult a war hero, brag about grabbing women by the pussy, denigrate the judicial system, demonize immigrants, fight with the pope, doubt the democratic process, advocate torture and war crimes, tout the size of his junk in a presidential debate, trash the media, and endanger my life.”

Appearing on Tuesday’s Today show to hawk the book, Tur similarly described how “jarring” and “scary” it was when Trump would criticize her biased coverage during campaign stump speeches. “We had to have armed security,” she hyped.

Beyond recalling her nausea, Tur also pushed her bizarre fear that Trump would become a lifetime dictator: "I have a vision of myself at sixty, Trump at a hundred, in some midwestern convention hall. The children of his 2016 supporters are spitting on me.”

After expressing her loathing of the President in such detail, does anyone really believe Tur can be an objective journalist?

So Tur should be grateful to Trump for endangering her life and maliciously belittling her profession? Is that the way Drennen would treat someone who did that to him?

The hatred the MRC has for journalists, it seems, borders on the pathological.

MRC Wants Jimmy Kimmel to Shut Up
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's first reaction to ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel calling out the Graham-Cassidy plan to dismantle the Affordable Care Act for, among other things, making it permissible for states to eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions was to send Nicholas Fondacaro to pen a lengthy tirade attacking the "tirade" he claimed Kimmel made and declaring that Kimmel was "politicizing his son’s medical condition to push for socialized medicine." He also took Kimmel's self-deprecation of himself as only an expert on eating pizza and tried to turn it into an insult.

In the process, Fondacaro selectively edited out much Kimmel said about the Graham-Cassidy plan opening the door to elimination of pre-existing condition coverage, and Sen. Bill Cassidy's promise to him that any health care plan he backs would not do that.

Fondacaro also stuck to regurgitating Republican talking points about the plan, insisting that the millions who would lose coverage under it would be "primarily driven by people CHOOSING not to purchase healthcare."Fondacaro went on to rant (boldface his):

In a cry of desperation for socialized medicine, he championed the health care systems of other countries: “It’s unbelievable. Somehow Japan, England, and Canada, and Germany, France, they all figured healthcare out. And don’t say they have terrible healthcare because it’s just not true.”

But the pizza eating expert was 100 percent wrong on what good health care looked like around the world. All one has to do was look at the case of newborn Charlie Gard. Because of healthcare rationing, a British court put him on a long path to death because they didn’t want to waste their resources on him or allow the family to take him to America for treatment.

We're still waiting to see if Kimmel agrees with that aspect of socialized medicine if that were his son.

Fondacaro didn't mention that Gard suffered from an extremely rare genetic disease for which there is no known cure; Kimmel's son suffers from a much less rare heart defect that can be repaired through open-heart surgery.

The clear intent of Fondacaro and the MRC here was to shut up Kimmel before his attacks on Graham-Cassidy gained any traction, but it was soon reduced to whining about the attention it got:

• Curtis Houck whined that CNN's Chris Cillizza, who wrote about Kimmel, failed to "fact-check" him.
• Fondacaro once again huffed that Kimmel went on an "anti-GOP tirade" and "was willing [sic] politicizing his son’s medical condition."
• Curtis Houck wrote a piece with the blaring headline "Ben Shapiro Eviscerates Jimmy Kimmel’s Health Care Tirades; ‘Egregious’ to Exploit His Son," complaining that Kimmel went on an "emotion-driven push to socialize health care."
• When Graham-Cassidy failed after key Republicans failed to support it, Kyle Drennen attacked anyone who credited Kimmel for it.

Finally, Tim Graham whined that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumerwas among those who helped Kimmel respond to Graham-Cassidy: "ABC is being used for Democrat propaganda, and then wonders: why won't people see us as fair and balanced? Why do people call us 'fake news'?" Not only does Graham fail to identify anything Kimmel said that was "fake" or "propaganda," he apparently thinks that a late-night talk show is "news."

MRC Obsesses Over Dem Mayor Accused of Abuse, Silent on Conservative Cradle-Robber
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center has taken an unusual interest in Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and the resurfacing of decades-old allegations of sexual abuse:

In April, Tom Blumer grumbled that the "establishment press" was insufficiently labeling Murray as a Democrat, purportedly because "Ed Murray is not just any Democrat, he's a progressive Democrat, and a "face of resistance" to Donald Trump." Blumer went on to accuse the Seattle Times of deliberately burying the allegations despite lacking evidence to back them up.

The next month, Blumer ranted that the Seattle media "didn't do its job to expose the accusations against Murray ... apparently giving him cover because he is a 'progressive' Democrat," adding: "If the Murray situation ends up going in the direction it appears to be headed, seeing how the Seattle Timesand the city's leftists try to explain away the fact that their permissive, 'gay-friendly' culture allowed a child molester to serve as their mayor for over three years, and as a state senator for the six years before that, should be quite a spectacle."

Blumer returned in July to once again grumble about Murray being insufficiently labeled as a Democrat as new accusations surfaced, cheering how Murray apparently now "fit the stereotype" of a child-molesting homosexual.

Following Murray's resignation earlier this month after more allegation surfaced, a self-satisfied Blumer declared that "Much of the press still insists on protecting the Democratic Party from its decades-long association with Murray." A companion post by Scott Whitlock similarly complained that the media was insufficiently identifying the party of the "liberal Democrat mayor."

Meanwhile, over at the MRC's "news" division CNSNews.com, managing editor Michael W. Chapman made sure to put "Gay Democratic Mayor" in the headline of his article about Murray's resignation. Chapman went on a scare-quote binge in noting that Murray is "married" and has a "husband," and he also touted previous articles on Murray that also put "Gay Democratic Mayor" in the headline.

Meanwhile, both CNS and the rest of the MRC have been silent so far on serial untoward, if not predatory, behavior by one of its favorite conservative icons.

Earlier this month, conservative actor James Woods made the mistake of complaining on his voluable Twitter account about an upcoming film about a gay relationship between a 24-year-old and a 17-year-old.One of the film's actors, Armie Hammer, responded by tweeting at Woods, "Didn't you date a 19 year old when you were 60.......?"(Actually, she was 20 and he was 66.) Then actress Amber Tamblyn reminded Woods that he tried to pick her and a friend up when she was a teenage unknown: "He wanted to take us to Vegas. 'I'm 16' I said. 'Even better' he said."

Woods accused Tamblyn of lying, but Tamblyn went on to pen an open letter detailing the story and asking, "Are you and your history with women and girls a part of the problem, Mr. Woods?" This was followed by a New York Times op-ed by Tamblyn in which she takes umbrage at Woods calling her a liar: "What would I get out of accusing this person of such an action, almost 20 years after the fact? Notoriety, power or respect? I am more than confident with my quota of all three. Even then, why would I choose the guy from 'Scary Movie 2' to help my stature when I’m already married to the other guy from 'Scary Movie 2'?"

Despite the fact that the various MRC divisions love to write about him and fawaningly quote his conservative-friendly Twitter rants -- sample headline: "James Woods Puts Traitor 'Brad' Manning In His/Her Place" -- no MRC website has breathed a word about Woods' serial cradle-robbing. While not the illegal offense Murray was accused of (albeit well outside the statute of limitations), it's increasingly creepy and unseemly as he apparently continues to like them barely legal even as he grows older.

This is just the latest example of the MRC turning refusing to hold its own side to the behavior it expects from the people it attacks.

MRC Writer Castigates Dem Obstruction of Nominees, Forgets That GOP Controls Congress
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Nicholas Fondacaro complained in a Sept. 18 post:

With President Trump set to address the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, NBC Nightly News spent a portion of Monday night’s broadcast slamming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and spreading rumors of his removal. Their gripe was over the fact that key positions inside his department had yet to be filled. The network’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell whined about it while neglecting to mention the unprecedented obstruction by Senate Democrats with confirmations.

[...]

What Mitchell failed to mention was the unprecedented obstruction by Senate Democrats with their confirmations. As proof of this: Two of the ambassadorships she whined about, Afghanistan and India both had nominees but they’re still waiting for the process to proceed. And as reported by The Washington Post, only 22 of the State Department nominees had been confirmed with another 39 awaiting confirmation. Many of those are ambassadorships.

And it’s not just Trump’s State Department feeling the pain. The Post also noted that out of Trump’s 345 total nominations, less than half (140) have been confirmed. That leaves another 196 nominees held-up by Senate Democrats, while 9 nominations had failed.

The nominees were also facing the longest confirmation process of any recent administration at 56 days for each one, the maximum time allowed.

But at no point does Fondacaro prove that any State Department nominee is being obstructed by Democrats.

Fondacaro also neglects the relevant fact that Republicans are majority party in Congress, so there's only so much obstructing Democrats can do. CNN has noted that "Democrats say the White House's failure to submit the full documentation for nominees -- along with necessary background checks and ethics paperwork -- is what's really holding up the nominations," adding that "it's still ultimately Republicans who control the calendar and committee process in the Senate."

But Fondacaro is too busy trying to score a partisan political point to actually do research on the issue he's writing about.

Hillary Derangement Syndrome, MRC Media Coverage Edition
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center remains in the throes of Hillary Derangement Syndrome. There's no better illustration of that than its predictable freakout any time someone suggests that media was unfair to her during the 2016 presidential election.

An Aug. 30 column by the MRC's Tim Graham and Brent Bozell lashes out at a Harvard University study pointing out that media coverage of Clinton "was focused on scandals, while [Donald] Trump's coverage focused on his core issues." They ranted: "No one could plausibly argue that the media was nicer to Trump than they were to Hillary Clinton, or that they treated his policy proposals with more respect. They dubbed Trump's comments on immigration and Islam as horribly scandalous, while they dismissed Clinton's scandals like the private email server as a 'stupid issue' (as John Dickerson of CBS said)."

But Graham and Bozell were really incensed that the Harvard study's examination of media was much broader than the MRC's usual exceedingly (and strategically) narrow narrow definition of a half-hour of evening news on three channels:

When most people hear the term "the press," they think of the traditional press, the so-called objective media outlets. But this Harvard study defined the press as including a bunch of "hyperpartisan" sites, from Breitbart on the right to the Daily Kos on the left. It evaluated social media, studying the most shared stories of the campaign. That might be interesting, but it's not a study of press coverage as most people understand it.

Just because the study's definition of media doesn't conform to the one the MRC constructed for maximum ideological explitation doesn't mean it's invalild. In fact, it's much more accurate. Let's not pretend that a significant number of Americans don't get a significant amount of their political news from "hyperpartisan" operations.

Bozell and Graham then returned to rant mode to attack the study's methodology:

But here's where we scream "Buyer beware" on these studies of campaign bias. Did the Harvard researchers actually read the contents of each story? No. They offered "content analysis using automated tools."

They had Media Cloud software scan sentences ... because their sample was literally millions of stories. This is as nebulous as counting the number of Google mentions of a topic to say whether it was overcovered or undercovered. At least another Harvard outfit, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, issues studies "conducted by trained full-time employees who visually evaluate the content."

As if this is somehow less rigorous than the MRC's so-called "methodology" of assigning entirely subjective "negative" or "positive" values to news coverage that deliberately fails to consider the factual accuracy of said coverage.It doesn't matter if the contents were read if that reader is so biased (remember, the ability to push a right-wing agenda is a prerequisite for employment at the MRC) that no reasonable person would consider his or her judgments to be objective.

Graham and Bozell concluded by huffing: "Clinton can't blame the liberal media for her defeat."

When Clinton embarked on a media to promote her campaign memoir, "What Happened," in which she blamed her loss in part on the media, the MRC went into freakout mode again, this time in a Sept. 15 post by Rich Noyes with the shouty headline "FACT: The News Media Did NOT Tip the Election to Trump." but all Noyes does is serve up it previous narrowly tailored studies that focus only on that half-hour of evening news on three channels.

For the first time, though -- perhaps annoyed by us pointing out just how strategically narrowly tailored its focus is -- Noyes  offers a justification for focusing only on that tiny sliver of time: reviewing only CBS, ABC and NBC is "the best proxy for a manageable examination of all campaign news from important national sources."

Well, no. Cable news channels are not important sources of news? Political websites aren't? 

The MRC has a multimillion-dollar budget, funded in no small part by Mercer money, and can easily afford to do more comprehensive research. But that would involve having to examine Fox News, whose bias the MRC simply refuses to acknowledge because it's the same bias the MRC wants all media to have.

Noyes' "facts" are preconceived, and the MRC sculpts its so-called evidence to reinforce those preconceived notions -- hence the focus only on network evening news shows to the exclusion of everything else.

Nevertheless, Noyes offers up his own final-paragraph huffing: "Hillary Clinton was not the media darling that Barack Obama was in 2008, but no reasonable person could suggest that political reporters created a landscape more favorable to Donald Trump than to her. And it’s just silly of her to say the news media, which detests Trump, was one of the causes of her defeat." And Noyes detests Clinton enough to insist this is true.

Hillary's book tour brought Graham and Bozell back out to rehash its column from a month earlier, insisting that the Harvard study it bashed last time around was "embarrassingly terrible" because it "included blogs and tweets and was judged by a computer, not actual humans." they went on to cite the MRC's own study, avoiding the fact that its exceedingly narrow focus on "the network evening news broadcasts" is even more embarassingly terrible.

Graham and Bozell let out another end-of-column whine: "All this demonstrates that the media display no self-respect when it's suggested they were all Trump lackeys without a conscience for the country. Where's the fight? Where's the rebuttal? Where's the disgust with such a shameless falsehood? The chin stroking just underlines that they were in Clinton's pantsuit pocket then and they remain there today."

Of course, Graham, Bozell and the rest of the MRC are Trump lackeys fully in his pocket, and they lack any self-respect in insisting their bogus studies have any value beyond advancing a right-wing anti-media agenda.

MRC, CNS Have A Sally Quinn Freakout
Topic: Media Research Center

CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman is horrified in a Sept. 13 blog post that "In her new book, Finding Magic: A Spiritual Memoir, Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn, the widow of former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (d.2014), admits that she believes in and has practiced the occult since childhood, and even placed hexes on people. He concluded by huffing: "The liberal media and Washington insiders, incidentally, mocked Nancy Reagan for consulting an astrologer. Why were they so silent, for decades, about Sally Quinn and her occultism?"

Perhaps because Quinn married to a journalist and was not the first lady of the United States, perhaps? That distinction appears to have escaped Chapman, who's much more comfortable promoting so-called Christians expressing their hatred for the LGBT community.

Chapman isn't the only Media Research Center employee huffing and puffing about Quinn. Tom Blumer is in full dudgeon at NewsBusters, somehow equating the lack of public knowledge about Quinn's occultic tendencies to a political scandal akin to Watergate (and cites co-worker Chapman along the way):

The reception given to Sally Quinn's new book, Finding Magic, has been strangely quiet.

Perhaps that's because the book shamelessly reveals that since 1973, if not earlier, Quinn, who was the nation's capital's de facto social gatekeeper for several decades, deceived the world about the true nature of her "religious" outlook, and did so with the help of the rest of the Washington press corps — that is, if one considers belief in the occult, practicing voodoo, and supposedly communicating with ghosts (sound familiar?) the foundations of a "religion."

[...]

The bolded sentence in the final excerpted paragraph is very telling. It reveals that Quinn's occultism was an open Beltway secret for over four decades which no reporter in the media echo chamber had the courage to share with the public this crowd of alleged journalists piously claims to serve.

[...]

Quinn, like so many other reporters who were or still are at the Post, was a fan of citing unnamed "sources." Ronald Reagan himself insisted that "no policy or decision in my mind has ever been influenced by astrology."

As to what's really "frightening and shocking," I'd place a closeted practitioner of occultism who believes in murderous hexes pretending to be offended by astrology to score cheap political points against the First Lady of a wildly successful two-term presidential administration several "frightening and shocking" notches above a protective First Lady who allegedly consulted the stars and had "a role" in Ronald Reagan's "scheduling."

[...]

Otherwise, media coverage of Quinn's new book has been very light.

It's understandable, given how this book effectively shames members of the Washington press corps irrevocably for the history books for a disgraceful four-plus decade coverup.

If Blumer could demonstrate when Quinn's personal life was relevant to anything she had done in public, he might have a point. Since he can't, he's just engaged in a meaningless right-wing rant.

MRC Churns Out Another Bogus Study
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center appears to be on a roll with its biased so-called "studies." It served up another one on Sept. 13 courtesy of Mike Ciandella:

The twin disasters of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma showcased once again the media's reflex to use such tragedies to push for liberal climate change policies.

In their pursuit of this agenda, the broadcast networks' have heavily criticized the Trump administration's policies on the environment. From January 20 through August 31, MRC analysts tallied 75 stories discussing the President and climate change, totaling 73 minutes, 43 seconds of network airtime.

The commentary in these stories was as one-sided as the rest of Trump's coverage has been, with 88 percent of evaluative statements criticizing the President, vs. a mere 12 percent that praised him.

Once again, Ciandella ignores the vast majority of of the media universe to portray a half-hour of time on three channels as representative of the entire "media." Also note that Ciandella is trying to politiclze science by declaring that anything that supports the scientific consensus on climate change to be "liberal."

And we have another dubious "methodology":

Methodology: Our measure of spin was designed to isolate the networks’ own slant, not the back-and-forth of partisan politics. Thus, our analysts ignored soundbites which merely showcased the traditional party line (Republicans supporting Trump, Democrats criticizing him), and instead tallied evaluative statements which imparted a clear positive or negative tone to the story, such as statements from experts presented as non-partisan, voters, or opinionated statements from the networks’ own reporters.

Using these criteria, MRC analysts tallied 121 evaluative statements about the Trump administration’s approach to the environment from January 20 to August 31, 2017, of which 106 (88%) were negative vs. a mere 15 (12%) which were positive.

Again, "negative" and "positive" are subjective values, not objective ones that can be subject to scientific definition and rigor, and Ciandella is either ignoring neutral statements or forcing them into "negative" or "positive" camps.

Ciandella's bias is obvious in the examples he cites (again, the MRC refused to release full documentation of the study results), in which he portrays the reporting of facts as negative:

The most consistent factor in all of this coverage was the criticism. NBC Nightly News correspondent Matt Bradley’s July 30 quip that “President Donald Trump shifts American climate commitments into reverse” was typical of the media attitude towards the president’s environmental policies.

On June 2, Nightly News correspondent Kristen Welker promoted an anti-Trump protest over this decision, hyping “the backlash is only heating up.”

The same night, CBS Evening News’s anchor Anthony Mason spoke of the “world of opposition to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.” Correspondent Chip Reid echoed by referencing “worldwide condemnation.”

NBC Nightly News, anchor Savannah Guthrie on June 1 criticized the move to withdraw from the climate treaty: “detractors say it is a stunning abandonment of the U.S.’s leadership in the world, and a grave threat to the planet itself.”

To their credit, CBS stood alone in interviewing a conservative to hear the other side of the climate change debate. On April 22, CBS Evening News, correspondent Dean Reynolds noted that Joe Bast, CEO of The Heartland Institute, “looks with approval on Mr. Trump’s decision to roll back regulations limiting greenhouse gases, and to his appointments of fellow skeptics in the administration. Climate change, he [Bast] says, is a naturally occurring cyclical phenomenon caused mostly by the sun, not an approaching disaster accelerated by carbon dioxide emissions caused by humans.”

However, before stating this position, Reynolds noted that “most climate scientists, the United Nations, as well as NASA, dismiss these arguments as propaganda for fossil fuels.

So Ciandella is effectively proving Stephen Colbert correct once again: Reality does have a well-known liberal bias.

MRC Writer Is Still Defending Gay Conversion Therapy
Topic: Media Research Center

Media Research Center writer Dawn Slusher has been extremely concerned that the TV show "Greenleaf" has a storyline about Kevin, a married man who is conflicted by his attraction to other men and attempts to deal with them by attending a church group involved with gay conversion therapy, fretting that the oft-discredited therapy will be discredited further and insisting that conversion therapy works.

Remarking in an Aug. 17 post on a scene in which Kevin confronts the leader of the conversion therapy program on how it's not working, Slusher rants (bolding is hers):

Suddenly, instead of Kevin voluntarily wanting to change because of his faith, he's now blaming the group leader for driving him crazy? And this was never about the group leader or anyone other than God, telling His followers what is right in His Word.

The question is, will the show use this storyline to show that Kevin truly wants to continue fighting his urges and is only angry because he failed, and that maybe he will try again once he calms down?

Or will they make Kevin to be the hero against those horrible conversion therapy groups that try so hard to help Christians make their own choices based on their faith rather than their flesh? (So awful of these groups to help such people despite the many success stories, right? God forbid people seek to live as they feel called to by their faith and voluntarily seek out the support of such groups to suppress urges they’d rather not have.)

Seeing that this is liberal Hollywood, and the Oprah Network at that, my money is on the former. Especially since Charity finds a letter Kevin left behind before leaving the house to confront the group and she seems extremely concerned. My guess is that the show will paint Kevin as suicidal in a future episode. Not because of his inner struggle between his faith and his desires, though, but because of Fortitude Families and intolerant Christians.

All the blame must lie with those who are trying to help Christians live out their faith. Because, of course.

Note to Slusher: Just because someone voluntarily seeks out something that's been proven to be psychologically harmful doesn't mean they should be encouraged to do it.

And, as before, Slusher's evidence that gay conversion therapy is a "success" are a pro-conversion therapy group that cites the virulently anti-gay group NARTH for backup, as well as Walt Heyer, a current fave of anti-gay activists who admits he was misdiagnosed as transgender.

MRC Decrees: Don't Talk About Climate Change During A Hurricane
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center gets plenty of love from conservative writers like Joe Concha, and it makes sure to return that love.

In a Sept. 11 MRC post, Curtis Houck cheers on Concha's haranguing of MSNBC's Ali Velshi for committing the offense of talking about climate change during a hurricane:

On Sunday night, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi showcased his desire to not let a deadly crisis like Hurricane Irma go to waste, reaffirming his belief that it’s appropriate to discuss climate change as the cause of hurricanes like Irma while lives were at stake.

Velshi made this pathetic proclamation during a Twitter debate with The Hill’s Joe Concha, who had tweeted that the media had largely been doing their job when it came to the hurricane.

[...]

Concha calmly replied that there was a “[t]ime and a place for that conversation...[b]ut while people’s homes & business are being devastated isn’t that time.”

When Velshi hit back that “I think this is the perfect time to have that discussion,” Concha seemed exasperated:

[...]

Just as the left largely congregates to gun control after a shooting while people lay dead, many of those same folks can’t help but talk up global warming while lives are at risk from flooding, high winds, storm surge, and tornadoes. And this doesn’t even touch the fact that these storms have been causing catastrophic damage for centuries.

People can debate the issue like any other topic, but as Concha astutely argued, the day of landfall isn’t the time for that.

Note Houck's biased language designed to paint those who point out that climate change have a role in hurricanes as irrational if not completely crazy: Velshi is "pathetic" and "hit back" at Concha, while Concha responded "calmly" and "astutely."Houck also attacked Velshi as among "liberal journalists" who were confined to comfy, safe studios in New York City and Washington" during the hurricane. But Concha, we can presume, was nowhere near the hurricane either, but he doesn't get slammed as a liberal elite.

Yet for all of this manufactured indignation over the proper time to discuss climate change in relation to hurridcanes, neither Houck nor Concha identified a specific time when that conversation could take place. We suspect that for them, the real answer is never.

MRC Shocked To Discover TV Show About Porn Has A Lot of Sex In It
Topic: Media Research Center

In a Sept. 10 post, the Media Research Center's Lindsay Kornick is shocked -- shocked! -- to that the new HBO show "The Deuce," about the porn industry in the 1970s, has a lot of sex in it:

The description of the newest HBO show, brought to us by Marxist creator David Simon, The Deuce reads, “The story of the legalization and ensuing rise of the porn industry in New York beginning in the 1970s.” If a plot like that doesn’t make your stomach churn, get your supply of eye-bleach ready for what’s sadly up to be the latest hit show on HBO’s hands - because this story, along with HBO itself, is all too ready to remind us that sex sells.

The September 10th pilot introduces us to New York City in 1971 and follows a variety of characters ranging from mob members to street pimps to sex workers to college students. I would tell you the plot, but this show seems far more interested in sexual imagery than original characters and storytelling that might mean something. The gratuitous sex I can almost forgive (okay, that’s a lie, I never will), but the sheer and mind-numbing boredom is the waterboarding icing on top of this torture cake. And there’s a lot to cover.

Over the course of this way-too-long pilot, we are treated to not one, not two, but FIVE graphic sex scenes. Forget everything you’ve known about the old X-rating, apparently everything goes now on television. Naked breasts or even an exposed penis is no longer a taboo but a feature. This show may try to lean on the “realistic” element of it being based on a true story, but that assumes that people want to get these scenes seared into their brains on a Sunday night.

Hang on, there’s more! One of those sex scenes just so happens to involve an underaged participant with "sex worker" Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal). For a sexually hungry boy’s birthday, his friends pool their funds together for some time in a motel where he fondles her bare breasts. We’re now throwing all forms of morality to the wind for, what the New York Times review calls, “Pure capitalism: desire quantified in $20 bills and in the quarters pumped into peep-show booths.” Sorry liberals, you don’t get to pawn off your failures to society onto capitalism this time. I’ve seen mud puddles less dirty than this show.

Kornick's evidence that Simon is a "Marxist creator" is a 2013 NewsBusters post on a speech by Simon in which he at no point calls himself a Marxist but says Marx accurately described the state of America now.

There's Plenty Wrong With The MRC's Latest So-Called Study
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center has been getting some great right-wing press for its latest so-called study. For example, conservative media reporter Joe Concha gushed in an appearance on Fox News, "I get they're conservative, but no one challenges their data."

Wrong, Joe. We've always challenged the MRC's data, and we'll do so once again here.

The MRC's new "study" by Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella arrived under the headline "The Liberal Media’s Summer of Pummeling Trump." And therein lies the MRC's first deception. The "study" does not examine the entire media, or even the entire "liberal media" -- it looks only at the evening newscasts on ABC, NBC and CBS. That's a very tiny sliver of the media, a half-hour on three channels. Throughout their report, Noyes and Ciandella repeatedly conflate this sliver with all of "TV."

Noyes and Ciandella then offered what they claimed was a "methodology":

Methodology: Our measure of spin was designed to isolate the networks’ own slant, not the back-and-forth of partisan politics. Thus, our analysts ignored soundbites which merely showcased the traditional party line (Republicans supporting Trump, Democrats criticizing him), and instead tallied evaluative statements which imparted a clear positive or negative tone to the story, such as statements from experts presented as non-partisan, voters, or opinionated statements from the networks’ own reporters.

Using these criteria, MRC analysts tallied 1,567 evaluative statements about the Trump administration in June, July and August, of which 1,422 (91%) were negative vs. a mere 145 (9%) which were positive. Since Trump took office on January 20, there have been 4,144 such evaluative statements, of which 3,712 (90%) were negative, vs. 432 (10%) which were positive.

First: "Spin" is not something that can be measured objectively -- it's an entirely subjective value. Similarly, "positive" and "negative" are subjective as well. Given the MRC's inherent bias against those very evening newscasts, it's predisposed to find negative evaluations, making its results even more biased and making that 91% number highly suspicious.

Second: The "evaluative statements" were only only positive or negative? There were no neutral evaluations? It's unlikely that all of the statements were so binary.

Third: Noyes and Ciandella make no evaluation of whether the Trump actions that were evaluated deserved the negative responses they claim to have documented, despite claiming that "All Presidents deserve critical news coverage from time to time." Instead, they assert without evidence that Trump is as "highly controversial" as President Obama was, but "Obama’s policies matched the liberal media’s preferences, while Trump’s agenda clearly clashes with the establishment media’s world view."

Fourth: Noyes and Ciandella don't provide a list of the "evaluative statements" they tallied, which makes this something of a black-box exercise. Perhaps they don't want people to know just how subjective their judgments are.

While Concha doesn't appear to think so, there's plenty to challenge about the MRC's data -- and it demonstrates that this study does not display scientific rigor and is too biased to be taken seriously as anything other than red meat for right-wing activists. You know, like most MRC "studies."

Yes, The MRC Is Anti-Media
Topic: Media Research Center

In an Aug. 29 post, the Media Research Center's Curtis Houck denounces the whole minor imbroglio over Melania Trump wearing stilettoes on her way to a presidential trip to visit victims of Hurricane Harvey. Houck insisted that this was "why people hate the media" and that the number of media outlets that reported the story "showed that many in the national and political media have no foresight for what actually matters." Then he added:

Liberal media defenders can claim that such criticism is delegitimizing the news media and that’s not what NewsBusters is dedicated to be doing. Rather, we’re simply bringing to light stories like these in which the media have done themselves a disservice to the public. 

Wrong. The MRC's goal is exactly to delegitimize the news media -- or, more to the point, any media that doesn't mindlessly promote right-wing talking points. That's why there is a Fox News-shaped blind spot in its media coverage (plus, it doesn't want to alienate the main TV outlet for its talking heads).

If the MRC really cared about "stories like these in which the media have done themselves a disservice to the public," where was its outrage when the right-wing media went crazy because President Obama put dijon mustard on his hamburger? Or when he mentioned arugula? Nowhere that we could find.

And if the MRC wasn't trying to delegitimize the media, it wouldn't be such a slavish acolyte to Donald Trump's even more hateful anti-media rhetoric.

Yes, Curtis, the MRC's job is to delegitimize any media that fails to advance a right-wing agenda. Until it can find it within itself to hold all media to account, let's not pretend otherwise.