A Nov. 3 Media Research Center CyberAlert item (and NewsBusters post) by Brent Baker falsely suggests that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was wrong to claim, in naming MRC president Brent Bozell as a nominee for Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” segment, that Bozell “wrote the Willie Horton ad.” Baker wrote: “Bozell ‘wrote the Willie Horton ad’? That 1988 ad, which continues to infuriate liberals, certainly has a lot of fathers.”
But Bozell does, in fact, proclaim his involvement in his Nov. 1 syndicated column: “For the record, it was your humble writer here who produced the very first Willie Horton ad.” It may not be the specific ad to which Olbermann is referring, but Bozell is clearly taking credit for introducing the Willie Horton issue (though he claims that “[i]t was only when I was shown the final ad that I learned that Willie Horton was black”).
Despite what Baker suggests, Olbermann’s claim (though not entirely accurate) is not coming from out of nowhere and is based in Bozell’s own words.