As we’ve previously detailed, the Media Research Center’s Tim Graham likes to pretend that conservative media bias doesn’t exist. He engages in another game of pretend in a Sept. 17 NewsBusters post.
Graham uses the post not to complain that the new owner of a Washington, D.C., TV station is pushing slanted news coverage but, rather, to complain that the slanted coverage was pointed out:
The Washington Post demonstrated a sudden interest in the political bias of local TV news on Wednesday. WJLA-TV, the ABC station in D.C., was purchased by Sinclair Broadcasting, which is now airing its conservative commentator Mark Hyman in Washington. They warned in a headline, “Under new owner, WJLA airs more conservative content.”
Media reporter Paul Farhi organized a parade of horrified liberals – except he didn’t identify any of them as liberals. In large type on the front page of the Style section was Charles Lewis of the leftist Center for Public Integrity: “They are stuck with an idiosyncratic owner with its own political views and agenda. It’s a nightmarish scenario for journalists.”
It’s “nightmarish” if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. But this critique is bizarre. The Center for Public Integrity has left-wing sugar daddies like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar with their own political agendas.
If the Center for Public Integrity is so “left-wing,” how does Graham account for the fact that John Solomon served as its director between stints as editor of the right-wing Washington Times? Or that CPI originally funded reporting attacking Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election (for which the work’s ultimate publisher, WorldNetDaily, had to apologize for the numerous false claims the work contained)?
Graham also complains:
Farhi’s assertion that WJLA has long been “nonpartisan” flies in the face of the 2010 firing of reporter Doug McKelway for “insubordination” after he reported on a Greenpeace protest calling the group “far left” and noting President Obama received a lot of Big Oil donations.
In fact, McKelway’s reporting on Obama’s purported “Big Oil donations” was false. As Media Matters noted, McKelway falsely claimed that Obama “accepted $77,051 in campaign contributions from BP” when, in fact, all but $1,000 of that money was from BP employees, not BP itself. And the report itself was not the “insubordination” for which McKelway was fired, as Graham claims; it was a “shouting match” with his boss over the factually flawed segment that prompted the firing.
And where is McKelway working now? Fox News, where he has racked up many more examples of his brand of biased news.
All of Graham’s dishonest fulminations are designed to distract from the fact that he refuses to admit that conservative media bias exists.