The Media Research Center’s latest love affair with supermarket tabloids is apparently over.
In an Aug. 20 NewsBusters post (and TimesWatch item), Tim Graham huffed that it was “shocking” to see the New York Times “spreading the latest headlines from the Globe supermarket tabloid” in a story about misperceptions that President Obama is a Muslim:
This must be more publicity for a Globe tabloid concoction than you’d see out of Fox News or the Rush Limbaugh program. But it’s used to illustrate how the president is bedeviled by lies. Stolberg didn’t seem to consider that the Globe and other supermarket tabloids also published stories about Laura Bush divorcing President Bush, of Bush is “back on the bottle,” and so on. But that didn’t seem to outrage the New York Times.
This is a change from two years ago, when the various MRC operations were touting tabloids for exposing John Edwards’ extramarital affair; Graham himself complained back then that the media was “ignoring the National Enquirer’s tale of John Edwards visiting what the tabloid claims is his mistress and the mother of his child.”
The ConWeb, including the MRC, has flip-flopped on tabloids for years, promoting them when they attack liberals and denouncing them when they stop being useful by highlighting conservative scandals.
Further, as Media Matters’ Jamison Foser notes, Graham’s complaint that the media didn’t express concern about tabloids that “published stories about Laura Bush divorcing President Bush” ignores the fact that the media repeated similar tabloid stories about the Clintons. Foser adds: “Would [Graham] be happy if the Times had responded to Globe reports of a coming Bush divorce by devoting 2,000 words to tallying up the number of nights the couple spent apart? Of course not: He’d have denounced it as evidence of “liberal bias,” and he’d still be doing so for years to come.”