A June 15 Media Research Center item by Brent Baker stated that Ed Chen, current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, “is leaving Bloomberg News to lend his shallow liberal advocacy to the left-wing Natural Resources Defense Council.”
How does Baker know that the NRDC is “left-wing”? He doesn’t say — no evidence is offered to support the claim. Baker has simply engaged in lazy name-calling, which, sadly, is the kind of thing that passes for “research” at the MRC.
Following in Baker’s lazy footsteps is WorldNetDaily’s Chelsea Schilling, who repeats Baker’s claims in her June 15 article asserting that Chen is going to engage in “leftist environmental advocacy.” Like Baker, Schilling can’t be bothered to identifiy exactly what NRDC policies are “leftist.”
Since Chen, as head of the the WHCA, refused to allow WND to take over the White House Correspondents’ Association banquet, Schilling rehashes all that whining and self-victimization — and tells a lie in the process.
As WND reported, Chen was at the center of a WND complaint against the White House Correspondents’ Association following the association’s rejection this year of WND’s request for three tables at the annual dinner, a news event as well as a social event in Washington. WND requested and submitted payment for three tables, but the association allocated only a couple of seats, cashing the check for one table.
However, the two seats were unusable because WND had planned to invite personnel and guests to honor Les Kinsolving’s tenure as a distinguished White House correspondent and announce the publication of a book, “Gadlfy,” about his career, written by his daughter, Kathleen Kinsolving Willmann.
In fact, WND claimed in an April 13 article that it was offered three seats, not two. In Schilling’s defense, she’s merely copy-and-pasting from a later WND article falsely claiming only two seats were offered.
Further, at no point does Schilling explain how two (or three) seats were “unusable” for the banquet’s primary purpose of eating a meal and enjoying the evening’s entertainment. The seats could easily have been occupied by Kinsolving, Joseph Farah and either Kinsolving’s wife or daughter, which would have also sufficiently served the purpose of honoring Kinsolving.