Apparently, as far as the Media Research Center is concerned, the only media bias that could possibly exist is “liberal media bias.”
Tim Graham uses a June 26 NewsBusters post to mock as “feminist” a study noting that the majority of people quoted in the media about abortion, birth control and Planned Parenthood are men. Graham adds:
The notion that abortion or birth control should be defined as “women’s issues” strangely ignores that women can’t get pregnant or feel the need to use contraceptives without having intercourse with men. It also ignores that roughly half of the aborted babies are boys.
But as even Graham notes, the male-female split isn’t anywhere close to half-and-half: Men were the sources of 81 percent of the quotes in abortion stories, 75 percent of birth-control stories, and 67 percent of stories on Planned Parenthood.
Still, Graham went on to snark: “It didn’t matter if the men were radical feminists, only that they were male.”
Of course, these kind of counting analyses are a staple of MRC’s so-called media research — for instance, a May 30 “media reality check” making the shocking discovery that liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz had on numerous “union activists, liberal journalists and Wisconsin state Democrats” to criticize “conservative Republican” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
If this “feminist” analysis is illegitimate, as Graham suggests, so is much of the MRC’s work.