The Media Research Center tried to gin up some controversy last week by making a big deal out of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s statement that Iranians “decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities.”
A June 2 MRC press release called the statement a “vicious slander.” further quoting MRC chief Brent Bozell as saying, “The Speaker of the House of Representatives slanders our troops in Iraq, whose blood, toil and tremendous sacrifice have led to the great and growing success we have seen there, and the liberal media are silent.” A June 2 NewsBusters post by Seton Motley (a version of which was posted at Human Events) insisted that Pelosi engaged in “a clear and willful defamation of our soldiers in Iraq, and a diminution of the great and growing success we have seen there, paid for with their blood, toil and tremendous sacrifice.”
But there’s one thing Motley and the MRC failed to mention in all their histrionics: What Pelosi said was true.
As Media Matters detailed, major media outlets like CNN, the Washington Post and USA Today reported a couple months back that Iran did, in fact, help broker a cease-fire agreement Sunday between Iraq’s government and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. We don’t recall anyone at the MRC complaining about it at the time.
Meanwhile, Motley went on to reference Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” comment, claiming that the media was “twisting and contorting the specificity of Limbaugh’s comment into a bogus broad-based slur of any American combatant opposed to the war.” That’s not exactly true; Limbaugh himself has offered inconsistent explanations for his statement, and in context it can indeed be interpreted as applying to “any American combatant opposed to the war.”
The funny thing, of course, is that Motley is complaining about Limbaugh being out of context and “contorted by the media into journalistic libel” when he and the MRC are doing the exact same thing to Pelosi.
Their smear of Pelosi appears to have fizzled — that’s what happens when one is faced with the truth.