Tim Graham is the director of media analysis at the Media Research Center. Here’s some of that “media analysis,” as described in a July 28 Newsmax article:
Journalists are trained to distrust the United States, and that distrust has trickled down to Israel, says Tim Graham, executive editor of NewsBusters and director of media analysis at the Media Research Center.
“They feel that in most foreign conflicts, they are trained as journalists to always suspect that the United States is doing something immoral,” Graham said Monday on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.
“In this conflict, Israel is seen as the United States, so Israel must be doing something wrong, especially when the prime minister’s not shaking hands with whoever the Palestinian leader of the moment is.
“In this particular case, Israel is the stand-in for the United States. Therefore, Israel is the aggressor and somehow the Palestinians are the victims.”
Seriously? Journalists are trained to distrust the United States? What planet is Graham from?
Graham claims to have had some journalism training in college (well, a mass communications minor), and we’re pretty sure that nobody at Bemidji State University ever attempted to train him to “distrust the United States.” Meanwhile, I have both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism, and say unequivocally that learning to distrust the United States was not part of my training.
It seems that Graham’s “media analysis” has nothing to do with how journalists actually work and everything to do with perpetuating a right-wing caricature of it. It may be divorced from reality, but hey, it apparently keeps the donations rolling in to the MRC.