It seems the Media Research Center and NewsBusters are still exempting themselves from their “Tell the Truth” campaign — and getting upset when others do. This time the subject is Fox News.
A Sept. 21 post by Matthew Balan complains that CNN’s Rick Sanchez called Fox News “essentially the voice of the Republican Party, whose job it is to make this man [Obama] look bad no matter what he does.” Which, of course, is clear to any casual viewer of the channel even without knowledge of News Corp.’s $1 million donation to a Republican activist group (which the MRC has been desperately trying to spin away).
Then, in a Sept. 23 post, Noel Sheppard took offense to Jon Stewart telling Bill O’Reilly that “on this network you are left-wing.” Sheppard insisted that MSNBC is “much further to the left than FNC is to the right.” How does he know? No actual evidence, of course, just assertions that in comparison to MSNBC’s prime-time lineup, which is all “far to the left,” O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are merely “right of center,” while Shepard Smith is “liberal” and Greta van Susteren “appears straight down the middle in her reporting,” which is not exactly true. Sheppard then whines:
As such, for six straight hours MSNBC extended prime time programming is nothing but far-left content designed for – and often by! – the most left-leaning elements on the Internet including Think Progress, Media Matters for America, and the Netroots.
By contrast, Fox offers viewers three mostly conservative programs, two neutral, and one liberal.
Yet FNC is considered extreme and a threat to our very civilization.
Of course, it’s not surprising that folks on the left and their media minions don’t see things this way, for simple arithmetic is not and has never been a strong suit for liberals.
Meanwhile, actual media research is not and has never been a strong suit for conservative media researchers.