Poor Tim Graham. He still thinks there’s such a thing as right-wing journalism with integrity.
In a June 25 NewsBusters post, the Media Research Center director of media analysis takes umbrage at conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker (because Parker refuses to march in lockstep with the right-wing agenda and is willing to criticize Trump, Graham sneers that she merely “is mistaken for a Republican”) for correctly pointing out that “mostly to blame for the demonization of the media broadly are faux news media outlets, Republicans and their cohorts” who are also cheering Donald Trump’s petulantly stripping the Washington Post of press credentials, and adding that most conservative news sources are little more than “aggregators dependent upon the mainstream media for their bread and butter” and that “Kill the messenger is their operating principle.”
Unsaid by Parker: “Kill the messenger” is the operating principle of the MRC. Graham didn’t admit that either, but that got him in a tizzy:
This only proves Kathleen Parker wouldn’t know the conservative blogosphere if it invaded her computer like a virus. In her mind, there can’t be a vibrant conservative media that represent the public and a “free and independent press.” Only the liberal media is authentically described as original journalism. That’s wildly inaccurate and arrogant.
Graham is careful to mention how Parker’s description of the conservative news media fits the MRC’s own “news” outlet, CNSNews.com, to a T. It’s enough of an aggregator that it subscribes to the Associated Press — which the rest of the MRC loves to bash as hopelessly liberal — and what passes for original journalism on the site is largely cherry-picking government statistics to make Obama look bad, shilling for right-wing causes (like the oil industry) and republishing anti-gay screeds from Franklin Graham and other gay-bashers.
If Parker’s critique of the right-wing media is “wildly inaccurate and arrogant,” how come it looks so much like the “news” outlet the MRC runs? Graham doesn’t have an answer for that. Heck, he didn’t even provide a list of right-wing outlets that do anything approaching good journalism.
The rest of Graham’s post is spent justifying Trump’s attack on the Post by bashing other Post columnists critical of Trump, further endorsing Trump’s war on the Post.