The Media Research Center has never been a stickler for context — when it comes to claims about liberals, anyway. By contrast, it demands proper context when it comes to conservatives.
We see that again in an Oct. 19 NewsBusters post by Randy Hall, who’s upset that PolitiFact Ohio put a claim made by a Republican candidate in its proper context.
What happened is that PolitiFact Ohio rated as “mostly false” a claim by Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel that his Democratic opponent, incumbent Sherrod Brown, “missed over 350 official votes” as a congressman. PolitiFact points out that the claim ignores the facts that the number of missed votes is a small number compared to the more than 10,000 or so votes Brown did take part in, and that most of those missed votes were due to injuries suffered in a car accident.
But Hall doesn’t care about context — he insists that the claim is “true” and that PolitiFact Ohio is engaging in “media bias” by telling the full truth about Mandel’s claim. He goes on to repeat claims by a Mandel spokesman that “Brown’s missed-vote ratio is higher than the median rate for all members of Congress, which is 2.5 percent, while Brown’s rate is 3 percent.”
Hall also ranted that “PolitiFact Ohio has often trumpeted information and statistics that favor Brown over Mandel, such as stating that the Democratic candidate supposedly tells the truth two-thirds of the time while the Republican lies two-thirds of the time,” adding that “fact-checking is rapidly becoming just another way for liberals to vent their venom regarding Republican candidates.” In reality, right-wingers like Hall and his fellow NewsBusters have engaged in a war on fact-checkers simply for having the audacity to fact-check what Republicans say.
Hall seems rather desperate to take refuge in a misleading claim. It’s just another example of how the MRC really doesn’t want anyone to tell the truth about Republicans.