When accusations of sexual harassment began to pile up against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, the Media Research Center was quick to defend Cain — a “personal friend” of MRC chief Brent Bozell — and smear his accusers.
Now, with a woman stepping forward to claim that she had an affair with Cain, the MRC smear job resumes.
In a Nov. 29 NewsBusters post, the MRC’s Scott Whitlock makes a point of highlighting Ginger White’s “questionable past” and “past legal problems, which include claims of stalking.”
funny, we don’t remember the MRC being concerned about Paula Jones’ “questionable past.”
Meanwhile, Whitlock’s boss, Brent Bozell, provides more heavy-handed defense of Cain in his Nov. 29 column, in which he plays the Clinton Equivocation card:
Ginger White’s charges sound a lot like Gennifer Flowers in 1992 saying she has a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton. So many in the press pounce on Flowers as unequivocal evidence of the media’s sense of balance. After all, they will remind us, just look how we covered that scandal!
Yes, look. Because it’s a wonderful exercise in media disinformation. Political junkies remember that Flowers held a <ital>press conference<ital> carried live on CNN on Thursday afternoon, January 23, 1992. It had all the elements for snappy news. She played audio tapes of phone conversations with Clinton. Despite all this, the first network mention was a brief mention by NBC’s Lisa Myers – more than 24 hours later. Other than that, the three broadcast network morning and evening newscasts waited to breathe the name “Flowers” for four days.
And then they dismissed the scandal as a non-scandal.
Bozell didn’t mention whether he scrutinized Flowers’ past the way his organization is scrutinizing White’s. Probably because he didn’t.
Bozell also howled: “But when Juanita Broaddick accused Chelsea’s father of raping her in a 1999 Dateline NBC interview, then-anchor Tom Brokaw never allowed one single second of her voice to break into the NBC Nightly News.” Bozell ignores the fact that Broaddrick had spent years denying anything that happened with Clinton, making her flip-flop suspect.
And at no point in his column does Bozell mention the pertinent fact that Cain is a friend of his.