MRC's "Media Reality Check" a little short on reality
September 17, 2009 1:16 pm ET by Terry Krepel
The Media Research Center's Rich Noyes has issued a "Media Reality Check" purporting to be a "report card" of how major media outlets covered the 9/12 anti-Obama protests. But Noyes' analysis is curiously incomplete.
For instance, Noyes noted the performance of only one newspaper, The New York Times, which "buried the protests on page A37 of Sunday's paper." Noyes didn't mention what The Washington Post did -- perhaps because it broke the MRC's faulty liberal-bias template by putting the protest prominently on the front page. (That high-profile placement wasn't enough for fellow MRC employee Tim Graham.)
Noyes didn't do any relevant comparison of coverage, complaining only that the Times' "932-word story [on the protest] was only slightly longer than the 724-word story the paper granted back in March to an ACORN protest with only 40 participants." But that protest was in the New York metro area and thus more directly relevant to its core readers than a larger protest outside of NYC.
A more direct comparison would be to a similarly sized 2002 anti-war protest in Washington. As we've noted, while the Times published a photo of the anti-Obama protest in its front page -- something Noyes failed to mention -- it did not do so for the anti-war protest; the articles on both protests were inside the A section.
Noyes also downplayed the extent to which Fox News fawned over the protest. He wrote: "By far, Fox News offered the most detailed coverage, with a two-hour midday program on Saturday plus regular updates throughout the day, and FNC stuck to presenting the protesters' point of view, not denigrating them."
Noyes fails to note that Fox News did a lot more than present the protesters' point of view -- it promoted the bejeezus out of the protest, to the point where it was an unofficial sponsor. That's some serious straying over the line from news into advocacy, but it earned Fox News an "A" for coverage from Noyes.
Noyes downgraded Fox News' rating on tone of coverage to an"A-" apparently for a single comment by Geraldo Rivera that Noyes called a "sour note." After all, balanced coverage of conservatives is not what Noyes and his MRC buddies really want -- nothing less than completely positive, sycophantic coverage will do.
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What it lacks, in pulling off that illusion, is anything that would remotely resemble a program above and beyond "We HATE Barack Obama!", screamed to the heavens with a great deal of froth. Think about it. The tea-baggers, the townhall attackers, the capitol marchers--what exactly is their program? That they're furious about "death panels" and illegal alien coverage in the health care bill? That they're furious a man who isn't a U.S. citizen, and probably even a Muslim, is being allowed to be President? That the administration is trying to implement socialism or fascism or some other black -ism? It's all just nonsense, a tapestry of falsehood spun for the purposes of organizing those who have been conditioned in such a way that their capacity for critical thought, when it comes to anyone outside their closed bubble, has been surgically removed. It has no goals, therefore it can't lead to anything, except maybe getting Barack Obama shot by some unhinged right-wing nutcase "patriot" who thinks he's saving us all from the next Hitler.
This is why the "protests" are significant. That is not how they're covered by the corporate press. If anyone has cause to complain about the coverage, it's the liberals.
Given the individual in question, I've always thought "Rich Noyes" a particularly amusing name.
The MRC has always been an unintentional joke. Their "media criticism" is hilariously inept, and driven solely by the partisan political considerations you outline. They aren't a general conservative org--they're a conservative Republican org, and, within that, aligned with a particular breed of (mostly reactionary) politicians and causes. They worked to elect Bush over McCain in the 2000 primaries. After he was elected, they explicitly aligned themselves with his administration. Here's what Brent Bozell, their lord and master, had to say in promotional material:
"We are training our guns on any media outlet or any reporter interfering with America's war on terrorism or trying to undermine the authority of President Bush."
These days, they're aligned with the roving astroturf freak-show.
Their functional definition of "bias" is just anything bad (or that could ever be interpreted as being bad) said about one of their pets. They don't care if it's accurate or even merited. They sometimes issue "studies"; these utilize bizarre and comically unsound methodologies. Perhaps most importantly, though, they lie. Not just a little, but on an everyday basis. There just isn't an honest bone to be found in the bodies of anyone at MRC. It isn't just that accuracy has never been a concern, there, or that everything they touch bears a deep brand of intellectual dishonesty; they actively lie to suit their political ends.
I've followed them for years, written about them a lot. I have some of my old pieces about their work on my website now. Back during the 2000 campaign, Bozell tried to paint Joe Lieberman as one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate.:
http://claslib2.tripod.com/lh/liberaljoe.html
Throughout that campaign, the MRC wallowed in "Al Gore the Liar" fictions--this one is as much a long catalog of their outright lies as it is a proper article:
http://claslib2.tripod.com/lh/liargore.html
And there was a follow-up not specifically tied to MRC:
http://claslib2.tripod.com/lh/liargorefup.html
And so on. I wrote about them quite a bit over the years. Took apart one of their "studies" at one point. I should probably dust off more of that material and put it up somewhere.
It's good to see MM poke a stick at them from time to time. It's a very rich vein of crackpot material to exploit. Rich noise.
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