Over the past couple of weeks, the Media Research Center has gotten a lot of mileage out of trying to shame broadcast outlets into covering the murder trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. It’s a selective shame, of course — the MRC has to focus only on broadcast networks and ignore inconvenient facts like how Fox News devoted the least amount of airtime of the three cable news networks to Gosnell’s arrest in 2011.
The latest step in the MRC’s campaign is an April 18 Culture & Media Institute article by Katie Yoder complaining that “besides the Media Research Center, an average of only 12 – 15 reporters appeared in the courtroom at a time on Wednesday, April 17.”
What Yoder doesn’t report in her article: April 17 was apparently the first anyone from the MRC attended trial proceedings.
We asked CMI managing editor Matt Philbin via Twitter if that was true — that April 17 was the first day that an MRC employee attended the Gosnell trial in person. He responded: “Like we have the resources? We don’t get Soros $.” We’ll take that as a yes.
By the way, Philbin’s crack about “Soros $” is silly because a) ConWebWatch doesn’t receive funding from anyone, let alone George Soros, b) the Scaife and Pickens money the MRC receives surely salves any wound it feels from not being a Soros beneficiary, and c) the MRC has a $12 million budget, and it couldn’t afford to send someone from Washington to Philadelphia to cover the trial only until it could justify doing so as a way to further its anti-media activism? Apparently, the MRC has to save that precious cash for important things like Times Square billboards.
So while the MRC was spending money trying to rouse conservatives into harassing the media to cover the Gosnell trial, it couldn’t be bothered to spend money on a hotel room, a laptop and gas money to send someone to Philly to cover the trial until three days ago.
That cynical approach proves once again that the MRC doesn’t care about journalism, except when it can be exploited to further its right-wing agenda.