In a Feb. 14 NewsBusters post, Tim Graham approvingly cites how, on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bernard Goldberg describes the Media Research Center as doing “God’s work when it comes to exposing liberal media bias.”This came during a segment attacking Media Matters (disclosure: my employer).
Before Goldberg said that, however, host Bill O’Reilly said this: “But now it seems like you have a Media Matters, and I don’t know if there’s a corresponding organization on the right. I don’t believe there is. All right, who are basically spinning stuff out to the Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times.”
O’Reilly doesn’t know that the MRC exists? That’s brutal.
Of course, O’Reilly may be playing dumb. The MRC spins stuff out to Fox News all the time — remember, Brent Bozell appears every week on Sean Hannity’s show, where there is no guest to counter his spin. And when former Fox anchor Brit Hume accepted the MRC’s William F. Buckley Award for Media Excellence, he expressed his gratitude for “the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report. I don’t know what we would have done without them. It was a daily, sort of a buffet of material to work from, and we – we — we certainly made tremendous use of it.”
Why, it’s as if the MRC is writing the scripts for Fox.
Nevertheless, Graham also decided to play dumb by pretending that the MRC is nice and honorable compared to those meanies at Media Matters: “Because liberal outlets dominate the media, there is no way that the MRC could demand the shutdown of a single network like the left-wing pressure groups do.”
This is coming from the same guy whose boss called President Obama a “skinny ghetto crackhead.” (The MRC has yet to acknowledge that Bozell did that.) And the same guy who “declared war on the liberal media.” So, yeah, that argument won’t fly.