Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell issued a petulant response to NBC’s Tom Brokaw over NBC’s request that Mitt Romney’s campaign remove a clip of Brokaw from one of its ads:
Come on, Tell The Truth, Tom! What really irks you is not that you’re part of a presidential ad; it’s that you’re part of a Republican candidate’s ad. You used NBC and your anchor chair as a platform to promote Democratic agendas and delight in Republican setbacks for more than 20 years. And you stood behind that reporting as a fair exercise in journalistic ethics, even when it was far from the truth.
If Tom Brokaw really cared about this kind of bias, he would do something about his own network and especially its sister network MSNBC given their outrageous pro-Obama nightly commentary disguised as news.
Bozell’s self-righteous statement would be less silly if he had said the same thing about Fox News when it made a similar request to a campaign.
Thing is, Fox went a lot farther than NBC has — in 2010, it actually sued the campaign of Democratic Missouri Senate candidate Robin Carnahan over its use of Fox News footage in a campaign ad in which Chris Wallace interviewed Carnahan’s opponent, Roy Blunt.
Bozell is too much of a coward to apply his NBC standard to Fox News — that Fox’s action against Carnahan means they’re offended to be part of a Democratic candidate’s ad, and that Fox serves as a platform to promote Republican agendas and delight in Democratic setbacks.
Unless Bozell will do that, there’s no reason to take his ranting against Brokaw with any sort of seriousness.