The Media Research Center is taking the Colbert axiom that facts have a liberal bias to the next level: It’s an expression of contempt to merely report facts.
Kyle Drennen wrote in a March 19 MRC item, headlined “Report on Iraq War Anniversary By NBC’s Richard Engel Drips With Contempt” (boldface is his):
In a report on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War for Tuesday’s NBC Today, chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was unable to conceal his contempt for the conflict: “Iraq’s oil money was supposed to pay for the war. It didn’t work out that way. From now on, the war set its own agenda, an insurgency erupted that became a religious civil war….Iraqis accuse the United States of invading to find weapons of mass destruction that were never there, and destroying a delicate religious balance.”
Engel continued: “The [Bush] White House stopped claiming all was well in Iraq, and thousands more troops surged. The violence dropped, and Americans left. Nine years, almost 4,500 troops killed, 32,000 wounded, 130,000 Iraqi civilians killed. The cost, according to a new study, nearly $2 trillion.”
How did Drennen read Engel’s mind to confirm the “contempt” in his heart? He doesn’t say. And Drennen never contradicts anything Engel reported.
That means Drennen is holding Engel in “contempt” for reporting the truth. That’s what passes for “media research” at the MRC.