Appearing on the October 13 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Media Research Center (MRC) president L. Brent Bozell III made the remarkable claim that, “if you've looked at any study that we've ever done, no one has ever questioned the findings that we've come up with.” This assertion is false; the “studies” that the MRC conducts are often based on faulty assumptions, techniques, and conclusions. They surely have been questioned, not least by Media Matters for America.

Bozell was responding to co-host Alan Colmes's assertion -- about the latest MRC “study” on the alleged bias in news coverage of Iraq -- that because the MRC is a conservative advocacy organization, "[w]e can't take your word as a fair and balanced, objective look at this, correct?" Colmes was half-right: The MRC's work is neither fair nor balanced -- but not because its researchers are conservative advocates. Having an ideological perspective does not preclude the production of work that is transparent, that is rooted in fact, and that makes a clear distinction between fact and opinion; but the MRC simply chooses not to do so. As Media Matters has detailed, the MRC's primary method of operation is to produce “studies” purporting to show the skew of news coverage by defining anything that does not repeat conservative spin as evidence of “liberal bias.”

The MRC's latest “study,” titled "TV's Bad News Brigade," which analyzes television news coverage of the Iraq war, is no different. The “study” charges that television news is “giving the public an inordinately gloomy portrait of the situation,” while “the positive accomplishments of U.S. soldiers and Iraq's new democratic leaders [are] being lost in a news agenda dominated by assassinations, car bombings and casualty reports.”

The obvious question, which the MRC never addresses, is what exactly is “inordinate” about the gloominess of the coverage. The “study” has no referent of what accurate coverage might be. Any news story that reports on terrorist acts or political instability seems to have been labeled “pessimistic.” We say “seems to” because the MRC website contains no description of the coding instrument used to derive the “study's” figures nor any link to the raw data. Rather, the “study” contains extensive anecdotes about what MRC considers “positive” and “negative” coverage of developments in Iraq.

So what exactly constitutes a “negative” story in the MRC's eyes? A hint is provided by the fact the report describes bombings and American casualties as “pessimistic developments”; at another point, American casualties are described as “another discouraging topic.” But the study ignores the relationship between reporting from Iraq and actual events in Iraq. For example, the study notes that just over half of the network stories in January and February “presented a negative slant” on the situation in Iraq, but that number “swelled to 73 percent” in August and September. But the study made no mention of the fact that U.S. deaths in Iraq from hostile action in January and February totaled 96 and “swelled” to 119 in August and September.

It does not seem to have occurred to the MRC that news coverage of the war might be extremely “negative” because -- to name just a few of the factors weighing on reports of the situation in Iraq -- terrorist attacks occur every day; the Iraqi army has exactly one battalion capable of fighting on its own; nearly 2,000 Americans have been killed and more than 14,000 wounded; the political situation is in constant danger of disintegration; and the country may be in danger of slipping into a civil war. One wonders exactly what sort of coverage of the Iraq war the MRC is looking for. Perhaps the answer was best summed up in this exchange between host Jon Stewart and correspondent Rob Corddry on a recent edition of Comedy Central's The Daily Show:

CORDDRY: How does one report the facts in an unbiased way when the facts themselves are biased?

STEWART: I'm sorry, Rob, did you say the facts are biased?

CORDDRY: That's right, Jon. From the names of our fallen soldiers, to the gradual withdrawal of our allies, to the growing insurgency, it's become all too clear that facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda.