Smell Tim Graham’s hypocrisy in this June 19 Media Research Center post:
Matthew Ingram at the left-wing Columbia Journalism Review is touting the hot new trend in “changing the landscape” of the liberal media: liberal advocacy groups developing their own reporting teams, often by recruiting people who wrote stories for the “mainstream” press.
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace have created their own “news rooms” because “they’re looking for impact. That agenda may coincide with the news, and they may use traditional journalistic techniques to advance it, but in most cases the larger goal of this work is in service of some kind of policy change or other action, and not information or the public record per se.”
First: Graham offers no evidence whatsoever that the Columbia Journalism Review is “left-wing.” Second: Graham seems to have missed that the trend of advocacy groups beginning their own “news” operations began on his side (i.e. the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal).
In fact, all he has to do is look down the hall at MRC headquarters to see a prime example of it: his organization’s own CNSNews.com. It certainly has promotion of an agenda as a much higher priority than reporting news. Graham cannot seriously claim otherwise.
Instead, Graham sneered that “Conservatives would say most major newspapers and TV networks are more interested in advancing an genda [sic] than putting ‘information on the public record per se.'” Of course, Graham is paid to say such silly things — and he would never say that (in public, anyway) about right-wing advocacy “news” operations like CNS.