Apparently, merely fact-checking a Republican is evidence of “liberal bias” at the Media Research Center.
A May 22 NewsBusters post by P.J. Gladnick invokes the Colbert principle — “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” — by attacking a McClatchy article that sought to fact-check Dick Cheney’s AEI speech. At no point does Gladnick dispute any claim in the article; rather, Gladnick personally attacks the reporters for merely doing the fact-check, calling them “a couple of political hacks taking partisan shots at Cheney” and asserting that the article “sounds like it came straight from a DNC talking points memo as written by Lawrence O’Donnell,” adding that “you could almost hear them echoing O’Donnell’s unhinged scream in the background.”
Again: No claim in the article was challenged. Gladnick attacked the reporters for reporting the truth.
Gladnick also curiously failed to mention that McClatchy published an article the same day as its Cheney fact-check asserting that President Obama “raised more questions than he answered Thursday about the legal prospects for Guantanamo Bay detainees.” Somehow we suspect that Gladnick will not find any partisan hackery here.
Gladnick sorta puts the lie to fellow NewsBuster Noel Sheppard’s claim that conservative media critics aren’t like liberal media critics who seek “a complete and total elimination of all opinion and viewpoints that are not in complete and total lockstep with their own.”