The Media Research Center went nuclear on the exaggerations of NBC’s Brian Williams, despite the fact that MRC chief Brent Bozell is guilty of much more serious falsehoods. But the MRC won’t call out Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly for making similar exaggerations, and as they continue to pile up, the MRC has now taken to sniping at O’Reilly’s accusers.
Bozell has been utterly silent on O’Reilly — after all, liars stick together. Thus, the role as chief sniper has fallen to Tim Graham, despite his role in helping Bozell hide the fact that he ghost-wrote Bozell’s syndicated columns for years. (If Graham didn’t speak out on the issue, he helped conceal it.)
Graham grumbled in a Feb. 24 NewsBusters post: “The left is trying to knock off O’Reilly after the Brian Williams scandal.” As if the MRC’s attack on Williams wasn’t motivated much more by partisan hatred than concern for journalistic integrity.
The fact that Graham’s post is mostly about an irrelevant side issue of whether a Washington Post blogger should have disclosed his wife’s employment with Mother Jones, the magazine that first disclosed O’Reilly’s exaggerations, shows that the MRC will be playing blame-the-messenger on O’Reilly in a way it didn’t regarding Williams.
Indeed, Graham attacked another messenger in a Feb. 25 post, bashing GQ for daring to opine on O’Reilly:
No one looks to GQ for political analysis. It would be like looking to Rolling Stone for religion coverage. But they can still ape the rest of the liberal media and mock Fox News. As the Fox haters campaign to get Bill O’Reilly canned, GQ (not an abbreviation for Genius Quotient) has come up with a mocking list of “18 Things That Actually Would Get Bill O’Reilly Fired.”
Graham took it even farther promoting his post on Twitter, seemingly questioning the sexuality of anyone who questions O’Reilly by sneering that GQ is “Foppishly against Fox”:
In a response to ConWebWatch, Graham denied he was questioning the sexuality of O’Reilly’s critics: “‘Foppish’ doesn’t mean gay, you doof.”
Graham’s not alone in aggressively ignoring the substance of the charges against O’Reilly. In a Feb. 25 NewsBusters post, Randy Hall similarly borrowed from the kill-the-messenger playbook: “Could this assault on the most popular person in cable news for 15 years be an attempt to balance the scales after the liberals recently lost former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams? Only time — and ratings — will tell.”
At no point does Hall acknowledge the factual basis behind the accusations against O’Reilly.