Noel Sheppard’s Sept. 18 NewsBusters post came too late to be included in our roundup of Heathering at NewsBusters, but it’s instructional in a way because it’s basically a one-stop Heathering shop.
Sheppard has a freakout that MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe said that “on his network, Joe Scarborough, former John McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, and former RNC chairman Michael Steele represent – wait for it! – conservative views.” And Sheppard gets all huffy about it, as he’s prone to do:
So Wolffe sees Schmidt, one of the biggest RINOs on television today, as being a conservative voice.
[…]
Frankly, Schmidt wouldn’t know a conservative view if it hit him in the face. But this is the kind of “conservative” liberal news stations love to bring on to trash Republicans.
No wonder Wolffe and Maddow love him.Now, I like Michael Steele, but he’s not a conservative. Right of center? Yes. Conservative? No.
As such, when you add it all up, the three so-called conservatives Wolffe cited by no means represent conservative views.
Sheppard doesn’t explain the difference between “right of center” and “conservative” views — funny since Sheppard and others at NewsBusters have no problem using “left of center” and “liberal” interchangeably.
Sheppard then declared that it is “after all an immutable fact” that Fox News’ Shepard Smith is “left of center.” But Sheppard doesn’t cite any of those “immutable facts” to back him up.
And then he sinks into MRC dogma-speak, whining that of “major newspapers,” only the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section “leans to the right, and that somehow compensates for all the others that lean to the left?” Sheppard doesn’t back up this claim either.
Sheppard even throws Fox’s Bill O’Reilly under the Heathering bus: “Anyone that has watched O’Reilly over the years knows full-well that he is not as conservative as he used to be, and often espouses rather left of center views.”
This, folks, is what passes for “media criticism” at the Media Research Center. Though it’s occasionally delivered with added anti-Semitism.