Media Resrch Ctr MRC

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promoted to primary 3/14, just because of number and importance of connections to usual suspects

see CNS for older?

SEE BOZELL

see disinfo

SEE MORANO

see newsbusters

no merri table

carribean cruise 8/15

also headline cut planned parent --> up hiv, abortions, clearly true but listed as absurdity on newsbusters

capt 819

cambr anal mercer?!

Crucially, this recording sets in context the claim by a senior Trump campaign source that “we have three major voter suppression operations under way”,made to Bloomberg in October 2016. By then Cambridge Analytica was working simultaneously with the Trump campaign; the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC, overseen personally by Rebekah Mercer; an underground platform doing psychographic microtargeting of congregations and religious communities;the far-right Media Research Center; theNational Rifle Association; and a massive, secretively funded campaign by the National Sports Shooting Federation of gun companies.

How to make black youth not vote...

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 At least two of the Toxic Ten have historic ties to funding from ExxonMobil: 

• Media Research Center, a self-described watchdog against “leftist bias in the news media and popular culture,” received at least $50,000 from ExxonMobil directly in between 2000 and 2003, and another $50,000 in 2009, along with more than $4.5 million from the Scaife Foundations, which themselves are financed in large part by the oil industry.
• Townhall, a right-wing media group originally founded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has received at least $870,000 in grants from ExxonMobil, according to the Climate Investigations Center.

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Media Research Center (MRC) - Bias and Credibility - Media Bias/Fact Check

These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Right Bias sources.

• Overall, we rate Media Research Center strongly right-biased based on advocacy for a conservative agenda and Mixed for factual reporting due to the promotion of propaganda, pseudoscience, and a poor fact-check record by their primary sources.

Detailed Report

Bias Rating: RIGHT (7.1)

Factual Reporting: MIXED (6.3)Country: USAMBFC’s Country Freedom Rank:MOSTLY FREEMedia Type: Organization/FoundationTraffic/Popularity: Minimal Traffic

MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY

History

The Media Research Center (MRC) is a politically conservative content analysis organization based in Reston, Virginia, founded in 1987 by activist L. Brent Bozell III. Its mission is to “prove—through sound scientific research—that liberal bias in the media exists and undermines traditional American values.” According to their about page, “MRC’s sole mission is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media. This makes the MRC’s work unique within the conservative movement.”

Read our profile on the United States government and media.

Funded by / Ownership

The Media Research Center is a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit organization. MRC is funded through donations, with some large donors including the Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Castle Rock, Carthage, and JM foundations. It also receives funding from ExxonMobil due to its skepticism on Climate Change. MRC also owns the Questionable news source CNS News and the factually Mixed right-biased Newsbusters. The Heritage Foundation states that Rebekah Mercer serves on the board of the Media Research Center. Rebekah Mercer is the daughter of right-wing philanthropist Robert Mercer who heavily funded the Trump Campaign.

Analysis / Bias

In review, MRC does not produce original content but links to other websites such as MRCTV, Newsbusters, and CNS News. These sources frequently utilize strong loaded emotional language such as this: The Embarrassing Questions NBC’s Moderators NEVER Asked. Articles are typically properly sourced; however, they use the Questionable CNS News as a primary source. CNS News has failed numerous fact-checks by IFCN fact-checkers.

The primary purpose of MRC is to expose liberal bias in the media. They often claim there is a conspiracy in the media to promote liberalism while suppressing conservatism. Journalist Brian Montopoli of Columbia Journalism Review in 2005 labeled MRC “just one part of a wider movement by the far right to demonize corporate media” rather than “make the media better.” Essentially, MRC is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party.

When it comes to science, MRC advocates for human-influenced climate denialism as well as creationism.

*Failed Fact Checks

• A factual search reveals that both Newsbusters and CNS News have failed numerous fact checks.
• Says there are fewer than 2,000 confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. – False
• “We have been cooling down for the past 4000 years”; the Earth has cooled since the ‘medieval warming’, “It’s all about when you start the measurements” – Inaccurate

Overall, we rate Media Research Center strongly right-biased based on advocacy for a conservative agenda and Mixed for factual reporting due to the promotion of propaganda, pseudoscience, and a poor fact-check record by their primary sources. (7/19/2016) Updated (D. Van Zandt 11/15/2024)

Source: https://www.mrc.org/

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MRC 11 25 RANDOM

Marc Morano Identifies ‘Craziest Thing’ Out of Censorship COP30 Summit

:

Nov. 18, 2025 . Catherine Salgado

Climate Depot Founder Marc Morano said Thursday that the single most alarming outcome of a COP30 climate summit in Brazil was its plans for crushing free speech.

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How Wikipedia Infiltrated Colleges to Train New Radical Editors

Nov. 21, 2025 . Eric Scheiner

How Wikipedia Infiltrated Colleges to Train Next Generation of Radical Editors

Luis Cornelio

|

November 17, 2025

EXCLUSIVE: Wikipedia and its little-known ally, Wiki Education, have quietly enlisted and trained more than 140,000 college students to build an army of activists who have already edited thousands of pages on the site, reshaping its content to push left-wing narratives, the Media Research Center has learned.

Wikipedia’s activist editors have flooded the so-called online encyclopedia with millions of words that, among other things, explicitly promote radical leftist ideology across a wide range of woke topics, including transgenderism, feminism, critical race theory, environmentalism and more.

Framed as an educational initiative, the effort looks more like a coordinated campaign of ideological indoctrination. Its apparent goal: manipulate public perception and cement long-term political influence, with Wikipedia as the primary conduit for ideological narratives.

Behind this effort is California-based non-profit Wiki Education, a Wikimedia Foundation spin-off that openly recruits professors to put students to work editing Wikipedia articles. It proclaims to serve as “the bridge between academia and Wikipedia.”

The non-profit brags that since 2010, it has been responsible for 120 million words added on Wikipedia, spanning over 7,650 classes and impacting 145,000 students. These entries have collectively garnered millions of views.

Wiki Education attempts to conceal its politics by employing nuanced language in its advocacy. But MRC’s investigation found that the non-profit embraces radical left-wing ideology: prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), fighting alleged “disinformation” and presenting a partisan version of supporting “democracy” in classes.

Its goals have paid off. Wikipedia has become a powerful weapon for the left. Among other clear biases, the Media Research Center exposed Wikipedia editors for effectively blacklisting right-leaning media outlets from being cited on entries and rushing to target and vandalize pages about Trump cabinet picks.

intranet image

Key Findings:

Classes that centered on left-wing topics like “queering religion” and crude gay sex are the norm at Wiki Education.

By Wiki Education taking advantage of provisions in the tax code and utilizing the vast resources of public universities across the country, taxpayers have largely footed the bill for this leftist agenda.

The remainder of the costs of this program have continued to be quietly covered by the Wikimedia Foundation, shaping its operations while avoiding blame for Wikipedia entries.

What Exactly Is Wiki Education?

The thousands of professors who collaborate with Wiki Education assign Wikipedia entries to their course requirements. Students earn course credits for each entry they edit. Wiki Education provides training and coordination to teach students how to edit Wikipedia.

In its own marketing, the group describes the collaboration this way: “You’ll bring your subject expertise, we’ll bring ours in Wikipedia, and together we’ll empower your students to fill in content gaps, enhance representation, and improve citations on the world’s largest encyclopedia.”

The Far Left Classes Being Embedded in Wikipedia

The MRC found that many courses hosted by Wiki Education are based on left-wing theory. Examples collected by the MRC include:

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"Queering Religion" (Skidmore College, Fall 2025). This class seeks to explore queer reinterpretations of Abrahamic religions, including American Christianity, while excluding Islam. The course concentrates on “rituals, gender identities, same-sex eroticism, embodiment, the divine, and textual traditions with a focus on American Christian, Jewish, and Indigenous traditions of the 20th century.”

“Queer of Color Critique” (UC Berkeley, Fall 2025). This class seeks to expand knowledge of topics related to “marginalized sexual communities and cultures.” Among the Wikipedia pages assigned was “LGBTQ Slang,” which explains gay terms like “bussy,” used to refer to the male anus, and “bottom” or “power bottom,” which refer to roles in gay sexual activities.

The fixation on social orientation and gender extends to classes like “Gender and Identity in STEM” (University of Oklahoma, Fall 2023), “Gender and Technology” (MacEwan University, Fall 2024), “LGBTQ Reproduction” (University of Michigan, Fall 2025), “Transgender Studies” (Western Illinois University - Quad Cities, Spring 2018) and “Gender and Sexuality in Latinx Pop Culture” (UC Berkeley, Spring 2023).

“Race” also appeared in Wiki Education’s classes. One class, “Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance” (Colby College, Spring 2020), uses tap dance to “understand and think critically” about critical race theory, black feminist thought and feminist performance theory.

In 2025, Wiki Education hosted “Race and Power in the Renaissance” (University of Toronto, Winter 2025) to explore the ties between race, imperialism and culture in the 14th-century movement.

Wiki Education’s activism runs so deep that it transforms seemingly neutral subjects into vehicles for left-wing narratives. For instance, take “Hidden Figures-Neuroscience through Diversity” (University of Virginia, Spring 2024), a class that describes itself as a neuroscience course but explicitly focuses on “bias in citation rates” and “tools to fight it.”

Another example is “Environmental Politics” (University of Michigan-Dearborn, Fall 2025), a course that trains student activists to inject political framing into environmental topics. A third class, “Asian Religions in America” (Skidmore College, Fall 2025), turns the study of faith into a project on “(mis)representation” and “racist caricatures.”

Additionally, “Environmental and Climate Justice” (University of Lynchburg, Spring 2025) proclaims to focus on the “disproportionate impacts of environmental decisions and underprivileged social groups.”

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Two classes studied so-called disinformation and how to counter it: “Media and Mis-Disinformation” (Methodist University, Spring 2023) and “TAS 223 DisInformation” (Nazareth College, Spring 2023), teaching students to identify and counter mis-, dis- and malinformation, and even “conspiracy theories.” Tellingly, the first class zeroed in on how alleged disinformation “breeds social mistrust, worsens public health outcomes, and disrupts political processes, among other social ills.”

What could be studies of science or faith are twisted into activism, with students rewriting Wikipedia to push policy narratives. The focus on left-wing topics has been evident in classes since 2013, according to Wiki Education's publicly available database.

Inside the Master Plan Behind Wiki Education’s Origins

Wiki Education began inside the Wikimedia Foundation in 2010 and spun off as a separate nonprofit in 2013. At the time, Wikimedia framed the move as putting the education program under volunteer controls.

“As part of Wikimedia’s goal to have the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada directed by volunteers, the program will formally move to a new nonprofit organization, the Wiki Education Foundation, beginning this month,” then-Wiki Education board member Mike Christie said in a statement Nov. 7, 2013. [Emphasis added.]

However, a closer look at statements from that period suggests a different motive. Wiki Education was born out of Wikimedia’s desire to steer Wikipedia’s radical content without taking responsibility for it.

By spinning off the non-profit, Wikimedia created a convenient way to influence Wikipedia while keeping its hands clean. This control was visible through direct funding, staffing and public endorsements, making it clear that Wikimedia's oversight of Wiki Education was significant.

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Such a tight connection was evident in 2017 when the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees unanimously approved a resolution to facilitate the funneling of tax-exempt donations to Wiki Education. The board affirmed that “for purposes of eligibility to submit funding requests,” it “should treat the Wiki Education Foundation as it would treat a Wikimedia-affiliated entity.”

Wikimedia Controls Wiki Education Through Staffing

Wikimedia's influence on Wiki Education extends directly into staffing and board appointments. Glancing at the staff roster, something unmistakably reeks of Wikimedia, as many Wiki Education staff and board members are former Wikimedia employees or operatives.

Frank Schulenburg, a German native and self-described Wikipedia writer, leads Wiki Education. According to his LinkedIn profile and a publicly available Wikimedia profile, he spent half a decade working at Wikimedia, directly reporting to embattled former Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner.

He held various jobs within Wikimedia before landing the top job of Senior Director of Programs, overseeing the early implementation of the non-profit's education initiatives. He is now the first executive director of Wiki Education, earning over $200,000 a year, according to IRS documents reviewed by MRC.

Wiki Education Deputy Director LiAnna Davis was a top Wikimedia official who served as the communications manager for the initial pilot program that evolved into Wiki Education. She currently earns a six-figure salary.

Nearly 40 percent of Wiki Education’s board members have ties to Wikimedia. Gardner, the controversial former long-time Wikimedia executive director, sits on the board.

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Current Wiki Education board member Garfield Byrd previously served as Chief of Finance and Administration for Wikimedia and also served on the Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee.

Richard Knipel, another member of Wiki Education’s board, is the president of Wikimedia’s New York City chapter.

Sage Ross, Wiki Education’s chief technology officer, joined Wikimedia in 2010 for the same early development of the program. Kelly Doyle Kim, a project manager focusing on expanding equity, served for at least seven years as a board member of Wikimedia’s D.C. chapter.

How Wikimedia Controls Wiki Education Through Funding

Wikimedia’s operational support has been continuously augmented due to steady and substantial cash infusions to fund the core operations of Wiki Education. The first seed grant was provided in 2013, with millions more provided over the following 12 years, bringing the total to at least $3.9 million allocated for Wiki Education’s core operations.

These donations are mere supplements to the massive taxpayer subsidies provided by the public colleges and universities, which largely fund the professors who train students to become activists for Wikimedia.

While the total taxpayer contributions to this agenda are not known, the MRC has identified several grants from the Wikimedia Foundation to Wiki Education. These allocations are spread across multiple, at times confusing, grant pages. The funding appears to include the following:

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Funding requests and approvals included the following:

$1.4 million (2024-26) — General Support Fund

$1.03 million (2022-23) — General Support Fund

$400,000 (December 2019) — Annual Planning Grant

$400,000 (January 2018) — Annual Planning Grant

$25,000 (2018) — Tech contract (Q1 2018)

$99,996 (2017) — Simple Annual Plan Grant

These figures are non-exhaustive and were compiled from publicly available records reviewed by the Media Research Center. Wikimedia has not disclosed the full scope of its material support, including guidance, meetings or advisory input. The foundation operates multiple grant programs, which Wiki Education has tapped into.

Together, they have constructed an intricate system to achieve their goals. Wiki Education must show progress as part of its grant agreement with Wikimedia, creating a regular reporting loop between the two entities.

Wiki Education’s Donations to Democrat-aligned Campaigns

The partisan bias of Wiki Education staff is apparent in their campaign donations, which have been directed exclusively to Democratic candidates. According to Federal Election Commission disclosures reviewed by the Media Research Center, top staff and board members of Wiki Education contributed a total of at least $36,838.13 to Democratic politicians and liberal causes.

The largest combined contributions came from Wiki Education Senior Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal, who gave $13,276.25 to various campaigns and PACs from 2020 to 2024, and LiAnna Davis, who contributed $12,323.67 between 2015 to 2025, according to FEC disclosures. Their money flowed through ActBlue to the Senate Majority PAC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the presidential campaigns of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Other relatively unknown yet radical PACs also benefited. According to FEC disclosures, Sage Ross gave $5,000 to Swing Left in 2018 — the same PAC that helped Democrats win the House majority that year.

LiAnna Davis also contributed $2,000 each to Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund, as well as $500 to Courage to Change, the super PAC launched by “Squad” member and self-described democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

Consequences

These findings expose a deep-seated ideological bias within Wikipedia, a site that once proclaimed to embrace neutrality but now functions as a gatekeeper for left-wing narratives while shutting down conservative viewpoints.

In February, the MRC uncovered that Wikipedia had effectively blacklisted right-leaning media from its source materials under the guise of “reliability.” Its “Reliable Sources/Perennial Sources” list, where editors decide which publications are acceptable, functions as a censorship tool, ensuring conservative perspectives are excluded.

Among the outlets effectively blacklisted are Breitbart, Fox News, The Daily Caller, Daily Mail, Newsmax and OANN.

The bias extends beyond media sources and plays out in real time.

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The MRC documented multiple cases where Wikipedia pages for Trump administration nominees were vandalized following their nominations, including those for Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

These attacks reveal an activist editing culture that punishes dissent and weaponizes information against the left’s political opponents, and it has now been built into colleges and universities.

Wiki Education’s campus programs and Wikipedia’s editorial culture form a seamless pipeline of activism: courses instill left-wing narratives, students embed them into pages and Wikipedia cements them as alleged fact.

Backed by Wikimedia funding and staffing, the effort enables ideological actors to reshape public knowledge under the cover of academia and volunteerism.

MRC Free Speech America Intern Evan Redding provided crucial research for this report.

NewsBusters' Tim Graham and Curtis Houck on Newsmax's 'National Report'

Nov. 21, 2025 . Craig Millward

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DESMOG

SOME MISSING SEE NEWSBUSTERS

2X

April 23, 2018

The Media Research Center, represented by Saulius “Saul” Anuzius, was among 22 groups signed on to an open letter asking President Trump to ignore recent criticism of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.²²

In a speech to the U.S. Senate, a group of Democratic senators identified the organizations as front groups for the Koch Brothers and other wealthy donors, nicknamed the “Web of Deceit.” The senators outlined how, in addition to funding from the Koch network, many of the groups use untraceable “dark money” funneled through groups like Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust to influence legislation, particularly with regards to climate and pollution.

Senator Whitehouse outlined it as “a web of deceit conceived and bankrolled by the Koch brothers and other self-interested billionaires to advocate for very selfish and unpatriotic policies.” Whitehouse added: “This web of deceit has infiltrated and populated the Trump administration, and it is swamping the interests of everyday Americans.²³

The full list of pro-Pruitt signatories and their respective organizations is as follows:

• Saulius “Saul” Anuzius – 60 Plus Association
• Fred Birnbaum – Idaho Freedom Foundation
• L. Brent Bozell III – Media Research Center
• Amy Oliver Cooke – Independence Institute
• Wesley Denton – Conservative Partnership Institute
• Viv Forbes – The Carbon Sense Coalition
• Frank J Gaffney – Center for Security Policy
• Steve Goreham – Climate Science Coalition of America
• Phil Kerpen – American Commitment
• Andrew Langer – Institute for Liberty
• Lisa B. Nelson – American Legislative Exchange Council
• Rick Manning – Americans for Limited Government
• Jenny Beth Martin – Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund
• William Perry Pendley – Mountain States Legal Foundation
• Thomas Pyle – American Energy Alliance
• George Rasley – ConservativeHQ.com
• Sandy Rios – American Family Association
• Craig Richardson – Energy & Environment Legal Institute
• Craig Rucker – Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)
• Dr Jameson Taylor – Missisippi Center for Public Policy
• Kyle Wingfield – Georgia Public Policy Foundation

July 28, 2015

The MRC Business reportedthat James Hansen’s recent study about rising sea levels had “zero credibility,” citing an unnamed geologist as their source.²⁴

MRC Busines salso quotesClimate Depot‘s Marc Morano as saying “The world needs to take a collective yawn at Hansen’s latest claims and ask how in the world was this man ever allowed to be in charge of the NASA temperature datasets.”²⁵

June, 2004

The Media Research Center raised $2.8 million for newspaper ads in 15 markets, billboards in 40 cities and a talk-radio blitz aimed at countering what he sees as a “liberal jihad” that is unfair to President Bush, writes *The Washington Post*. The MRC’s uses the slogan “Don’t believe the liberal media!”²⁶

“This is a media that in the last year has gotten out of control,” MRC President Brent Bozell says. “They’re so blatant in the way they slant the news. […] It’s as if people in newsrooms have just taken off the gloves, whether it’s foreign policy, economic news or political news, there’s a spin on everything that’s said.”

March 2008

The Media Research Center’s project, Business & Media Institute (BMI), released a “special report” titled “Global Warming Censored” where they claimed that news networks were one-sided and not giving climate change skeptics enough coverage in mainstream media.²⁷

“[T]here are hundreds of scientists from around the world who question the global warming ‘consensus’ – but in the news the latter half of 2007 you had to look hard to find them,” Dan Gainor and Julia A. Seymour write in the article.²⁸

2007

The MRC’s Business and Media Institute published its first special report on global warming, titled “Fire & Ice,” which it claimed “exposed the media’s warnings about impending climate doom during four different times in the last century switching from worries over global cooling to warming to cooling to warming again.” ^29 ^30

In the “Recommendations” section of the BMI report, Dan Gainor questions mainstream climate science:

”[…] Most scientists do agree that the earth has warmed a little more than a degree in the last 100 years. That doesn’t mean that scientists concur mankind is to blame. Even if that were the case, the impact of warming is unclear.”³¹

Related Organizations

• CNSNews.com
• NewsBusters
• TimesWatch
• Culture and Media Institute
• MRC Action Team
• Cybercast News Service (CNSNews.com)
• The Parents Television Council³²

Social Media

• @theMRC on Twitter.
• “Media Research Center” on Facebook.
• “Media Research Center” on LinkedIn.

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GGL AI 10 25

Media Research Center (MRC)

The Media Research Center, a conservative content analysis and media watchdog group in the U.S., is funded by numerous conservative donors and foundations.

• Major Donors and Foundations: Significant funding has been received from sources such as the Mercer Family Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and Donors Trust.
• Individual Donors: It also receives funding from other conservative-leaning donors and foundations, including the John Templeton Foundation and the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation.
• Anonymous Donor: It was originally established with funding from a single anonymous donor.

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open ltr ~ jan 6

We ask that the GOP conference meet immediately to vote on stripping Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger from their membership in the GOP conference. We further inform you that conservative leaders are launching a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.

The Honorable Edwin Meese III}:

Attorney General

President Ronald Reagan (1985-1988)}:|The Honorable J. Kenneth Blackwell

Chairman, Conservative Action Project (CAP)

Chairman, Constitutional Congress, Inc.|

Honorable}: Bob McEwen (R-OH)}:

U.S. House Committee on Rules

Former Member|The Honorable Matt Schlapp

Chairman

American Conservative Union (ACU)|

...

:{All organizations listed for IDENTIFICATION purposes only.

Signatures updated: 12/21/21.}:

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12 23

About

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Testimonials & Endorsements

Donald J. Trump

Former President

“According to the Media Research Center, 89% of the media’s coverage of our administration has been negative and purposely negative.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis

"No question that media have an agenda, and MRC has pointed this out, I think, very appropriately for a number of years."

Rush Limbaugh

“Brent Bozell and the MRC provide a most precious commodity — a quest for the truth. I can’t possibly expose every example of bias and error that emanates from the national mainstream media, but Bozell and his group come as close as anyone can. MRC is a vital national interest.”

Sen. Ted Cruz

"The liberal media is almost without exception comprised of Democrats who fight for liberal political agendas, and every day for the last 15 years, NewsBusters has doggedly exposed their bias, falsehoods, and inaccurate reporting."

Kayleigh McEnany

Fox News Host, Former WH Press Secretary

“I love NewsBusters, Media Research Center, one of my top go-to sources. I’m so glad you exist. It’s awesome. Love you guys.”

Laura Ingraham

Fox News Channel Host

“I am so thankful for your being here, for Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, his entire team. It takes a huge effort and phenomenal team to do what they do on a daily basis.”

Lt. Col. Allen West

“We have to have that guardian (MRC) that really does look at the objectivity of the media and what is going on so that we can tell the American people the truth… So that we can have that level playing field out there.”

Chris Plante

National Talk Show Host

“Media Research Center, MRC, the great Brent Bozell and his wonderful organization, Media Research Center. They do NewsBusters and online and everything else. They monitor, they watch the network news...”

Sean Hannity

Fox News Host

“The MRC has played a key role in our culture, not just documenting and exposing liberal bias, but helping to pave the way for the growth of an alternative media.”

Larry O’Connor

WMAL Mornings

“It is stunning, and we are so appreciative of the great work that you do at Media Research Center, and you’re going to be invaluable as you always are, but especially in this election cycle.”

Cal Thomas

Syndicated Columnist

“I want to thank the MRC, which I tremendously respect … and the research that they do that is impeccable. I have often quoted it in my columns.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser

President, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America

“Without MRC’s Free Speech America project, Big Tech giants like Google would go virtually unchallenged as they tilt the scales in favor of their friends in the Big Abortion lobby.”

Tom Fitton

President Judicial Watch

“The MRC is an essential resource. Liberals have argued that media bias is in the eyes of the beholder, and the MRC supplies conservatives with the information to show that’s not true. Media bias is factual and can be documented.”

Sen. Marco Rubio

“Media Research Center is an important force in holding the media accountable. Brent Bozell and his team do extraordinary work in making sure the conservative message gets a fair hearing in the news.”

Sen. Mike Lee

“MRC has been holding the media accountable for Left-wing bias and selective reporting. They are an important resource for the country and are making a significant impact.”

Mike Pence

Former Vice President

“Thank you, MRC. I am grateful for your extraordinary leadership for freedom.”

Kara Frederick

Director, Heritage Tech Policy Center

“You have the Media Research Center, which is acting as a lion in this regard (Section 230 reform).”

Rachael Slobodien

Communications Director, Mike Pence for President

"We applaud MRC’s work for shining a light on Google’s continued bias against conservatives. Google’s actions to censor conservative Republicans like Mike Pence demonstrate that Big Tech giants aren’t remotely interested in an open exchange of ideas."

Brigitte Gabriel

Founder, ACT for America

“What would we do without the MRC and all the amazing work they do in supporting, protecting, educating, and getting our voices out? Because, God knows, they [liberal media] are trying to drown us. We all can lean on the MRC to support us.”

Mark Levin

Author, National Radio and TV Host

“MRC is a North Star for the conservative movement. No one talks about objective media because they know, thanks to the work of the MRC, there’s no such thing. Only the MRC has the know-how, the resources, and the dedication to track liberal bias 24/7. I rely on them all the time.”

Hon. Jim DeMint

Founder of the Conservative Partnership Institute

“MRC does such fantastic work, but more importantly, Brent and his people are building an entire conservative movement, an American movement.”

Steve Forbes

Editor-in-Chief, Forbes Media

“Before the emergence of talk radio, before Fox News…there was Brent Bozell. The MRC pioneered an entire cottage industry that effectively holds the national media accountable before the public. The exponential growth of alternative media owes a lot to MRC.”

Trace Gallagher

Fox News Anchor

“I want to praise the work that you (Brent Bozell) and your team have done at the Media Research Center for breaking the story about George Soros having his fingerprints on media organizations around the world.”

Fred Barnes

Political Commentator

"Nobody exposes inaccuracy, sensationalism, and liberal bias in the mainstream press like Brent Bozell and his media sleuths at the Media Research Center. Their work is heroic.”

Kellyanne Conway

Political Consultant

“MRC has been a consistent shot of truth and light against an attempted, collective takedown of conservatism.”

Ken Blackwell

Senior Fellow, Family Research Council

“The Media Research Center is a beacon of light in a sea of media darkness … MRC is a great force for evening the playing field so that we can engage civically and politically in honest and forceful debate.”

David Bossie

President of Citizens United

“Brent Bozell and your team at MRC are the groundbreaking forces that have brought to light all of the left’s attempts through the media to really overcome the conservative movement since Ronald Reagan. I don’t know how we would get along without it.”

===

wow, CNS still around

attack

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/hans-bader/liberal-ags-climate-change-witchhunt-expands-include-more-innocent-victims

commentary (prophyactiv?]

Liberal AG’s Climate Change Witch-Hunt Expands to Include More Innocent Victims

By Hans Bader | June 22, 2016 |

###

A climate-change witch-hunt is expanding to include conservative groups that have never received a penny from Exxon. Attorney General Maura Healey is part of a multistate investigation of “climate change deniers” brought by 20 Democratic state attorneys general. As the Daily Caller notes, last week she issued a sweeping broad subpoena that

“demands decades worth of records from prominent conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and activist group Americans for Prosperity, and also from smaller, lesser known state-based right-leaning groups, such as Boston’s Beacon Hill Institute and the Acton Institute … At least two of the groups the subpoena demands records from have not received any money from Exxon. Beacon Hill and Americans for Prosperity have not gotten any Exxon funding, but are still being targeted.”

This is revealing, because, as Zero Hedge notes, all of these subpoenas are “anchoredin the claim that Exxon has lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of global warming in its communications and shareholder filings.” That rationale obviously provides no justification for a subpoena aimed at the Beacon Hill Institute, which has no connection to Exxon. Instead, it looks like a pretext for harassing conservative non-profits like the Beacon Hill Institute, whose free-market views make it a dissenter in a state whose legislature and judiciary are dominated by leftists.

The investigation is brought by people who are know-nothings when it comes to the First Amendment.

As I previously explained, the attorney general spearheading the multistate investigation, New York’s Eric Schneiderman, has publicly gotten basic First Amendment principles wrong (such as citing a dissenting view rejected by the Supreme Court as if it were the law), and Exxon does not appear to have told any lies about climate change (a company’s prudence in taking into account worst-case climate scenarios in hedging against future risks, and planning for the future, does not prove its belief in such scenarios, anymore than buying fire insurance proves you know that your home will burn down in the future). And speech by nonprofits funded by Exxon remains protected, as does Exxon’s decision to fund them, under court rulings like *Pfizer v. Giles* (1994)

Subjecting a person, or a non-profit like the Beacon Hill Institute, to burdensome document demands based on its viewpoint violates the First Amendment. Such demands violate free speech when they are in retaliation for the target’s viewpoint or past speech.  (See*Taoh v. Freeh* (1994)). They also violate free speech when they are so burdensome that they would chill the speech of a reasonable person.  (See*White v. Lee* (2000)). And they violate the First Amendment by demanding sensitive internal communications.  (See *Perry v. Schwarzenegger* (2009)).

Shortly after Healey’s subpoena, 13 mostly conservative state attorneys general such as Luther Strange of Alabama and Craig Richards of Alaska sent a June 15 letter to their fellow attorneys general, arguing that “this effort by our colleagues to police the global warming debate through the power of the subpoena is a grave mistake.” Quoting Justice Jackson’s concurrence in Thomas v. Collins (1945), they noted that our “‘forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.’”  They also pointed outthat the 20-state investigation of “climate change deniers” reflects viewpoint discrimination, since “’clean energy’ companies have funded non-profits who exaggerated the risks of climate change,” yet this “fraud” is not being investigated, only the purported “fraud” alleged against non-profits that have supposedly minimized the risks of climate change. The Supreme Court has said that even unprotected speech should not be regulated in a viewpoint-discriminatory fashion, in its decision in *R.A.V. v. St. Paul* (1992), which ruled that a city could not ban even unprotected “fighting words” based on the speaker’s viewpoint.

As part of the multistate climate-change investigation, an incredibly burdensome subpoena was sent to CEI on April 7, demanding 10 years of its records relating to a wide range of topics (CEI’s First Amendment objections to that subpoena are found here). We received that subpoena shortly after CEI’s Myron Ebell and I had publicly criticized the investigation. (The subpoena came in just as I was drafting an even longer commentary criticizing the investigation, which is found here).

Last month, CEI filed a motion for sanctions against the attorney general who sent us that subpoena, Claude Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands, under the District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP law.  The attorney general had belatedly withdrawn the DC version of the subpoena, but reserved the right to reinstate it at any time (the underlying Virgin Islands subpoena remains in place), essentially forcing CEI to live under a sword of Damocles. On June 2, the attorney general filed his opposition to our motion for sanctions, along with a transparently lame demand for sanctions against CEI unsupported by facts and caselaw. A hearing is pending in DC Superior Court next week, but it is not yet clear whether that hearing will adjudicate the merits of our motion, or defer its resolution until a later date.

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law.

:{

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Liberal AG's Climate Change Witch-Hunt Expands to Include More ...

https://www.cnsnews.com/.../liberal-ags-climate-change-witchhunt-expands-include-m...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Jun 22, 2016 - Attorney General Maura :{Healey:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is part of a multistate investigation of “climate ... all of these subpoenas are “anchored in the claim that :{Exxon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has lied to ... lies about climate change (a :{company's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: prudence in taking into account worst-case ... Subjecting a :{person:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, or a non-profit like the Beacon Hill Institute, ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

==

===

:{, the Media Research Center will :(style="color:#252525;"):}:now be “fact-checking the fact-checkers”: “In an era of ‘fake news’ and inaccurate reporting, it is important now more than ever that the fact-checkers themselves are exposed for their biases. MRC routinely finds instances when fact-checkers bend the truth or disproportionately target conservatives. We are assigning our own rating to their judgments and will expose the worst offenders.”

==

==

Chapter 1 Building the Machine p. 1

Acc in media set  up to defend RMn VN and watergate p5

MRC 6 m$ budget (scaife) FAIR cash on hand 25K$

July 2004 kennedy school symposium; Brokaw says Bozell has it wired w/ news ltr, aud --> immed response p 5

David Brooks Wkly Std  rw has dazzlingly efficient ideological delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out" p6  around 2003?

22% get news from talk radio

Rob Stein Democ Alliance 2004

Peter Lewis progressive insurance funded brock

Imus and Dobbs end up on Fox biz

Fox rept 2012

Beck target Kevin Jennings; rove lied nambla 19

Beck ad boycott

wapo's dana milbank

Palin defended beck on his show

rw talk #2 to country music, but can't bill as high for ads (1/2) 25

==

Published on Media Research Center (http://www.mrc.org)

Eco-Terrorists Attack Conservatives in New Film

Enviro film ‘Greedy Lying Bastards’ opens in more theaters after box office flop.

By

 Mike Ciandella

April 4, 2013 - 2:10pm

“Greedy Lying Bastards” follows “An Inconvenient Truth” in the climate change alarmism documentary film genre. The difference is this film lacked Al Gore’s name to give it momentum, although it has gotten some help from CNN [1].

The film is the creation of former eco-terrorist Craig Rosebraugh and actress Daryl Hannah [2] of “Splash,” “Kill Bill” and “Bladerunner” among others. The film made a mere $45,000 its March 8 opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo [3], which rated it the 400th movie of the past 365 days, and the 46th movie its March 8 opening weekend.

The documentary [1] says it “investigates the reason behind stalled efforts to tackle climate change despite consensus in the scientific community that it is not only a reality but also a growing problem that is placing us on the bring of disaster,” according to the official website [4]. The trailer, website and reviews for the film all make it out to be a collage of tried and true lefty climate change claims, complete with storm footage and villainization of the Koch brothers and the oil industry.

The Los Angeles Times [5] said that “longtime followers of this hyper-partisan topic may not find much terribly new or revealing here.” After an initial limited showing, the film was released in more theatres on March 29.

Rosebraugh, the film’s director, has been an outspoken activist for both the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, both of which are classified as domestic terror groups by the FBI [6]. In a press release on both groups, the FBI stated that “eco-terrorists and animal rights extremists are one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats in the U.S. today.”

One of the movie’s main targets is U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. Inhofe told The Tulsa World [7] that he was not surprised that the film targeted him, and he was proud of it on March 28. Inhofe was formerly the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. An outspoken conservative, Inhofe was also a winner of the Family Research Council [8]’s “True Blue” award for a consistent conservative voting record.

"As I said in July 2003, when I first called global warming thegreatest hoax perpetrated on the American people, science has been co-opted by those who care more about peddling gloom-and-doom fear tactics to drive their own broader political agenda," Inhofe told The Tulsa World.

"Just by watching the trailer, that's exactly what this video seems to do as well, leveraging the unknown to incite fear and raise money to make people like Al Gore even wealthier," he continued. Since his first speech on the topic, Inhofe has been surprised by how organizations have credited him as being “capable of singlehandedly bringing about the end of the world.”

Director Rosebraugh claimed that the media was biased in favor of “climate change deniers,” even comparing global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers in an interview with The Huffington Post [9]:“Fox [News] is far and away the extreme example. They’ll have a known Holocaust denier debating a Holocaust survivor. Or a tobacco industry representative still arguing that smoking isn’t linked to cancer.”

The Business and Media Institute has demonstrated the opposite, exposing the liberal media’s bias against climate change skeptics over [10] and over again [11].

Rosebraugh also called out Republicans in the same interview, saying that as “long as they continue to publicly question the science of climate change, so will the media.” Just like Gore has said, Rosebraugh claims the debate about climate change is “already over.”

Rosebraugh’s Holocaust statements echo CBS’s Scott Pelley [12] from 2006, who argued against including climate change skeptics on the news, saying that “If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

The film’s list of scientific “experts” included NASA scientist James Hansen [13] who’s predictions have failed to come true. In 1988, he warned that global temperatures would rise by 0.45 degrees Celsius. This was not the case [14]. However, Hansen began an August 2012 opinion piece for the Washington Post by saying that his predictions that year were too optimistic.

Hansen also called for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity [15]” in a 2008 speech to Congress, according to the U.K. news outlet the Guardian [16].

The film has gotten some publicity from the news media. During a March 9 CNN interview [1], the film’s executive producer, Daryl Hannah, was able to slam "false information" by the Koch brothers, compare herself to Martin Luther King, andcall for the "eradication" of Citizens United during the interview. CNN completely ignored that the director and writer of the film, Rosebraugh, was a former spokesman for eco-terrorist groups for years before abandoning his work.

Source URL: http://www.mrc.org/articles/eco-terrorists-attack-conservatives-new-film

http://www.mrc.org/articles/eco-terrorists-attack-conservatives-new-film

 is CNN, where environmental activists can launch their blistering attacks on man-made global warming skeptics without much of a challenge. On Tuesday's Starting Point, actress and activist Daryl Hannah promoted her new documentary "Greedy, Lying Bastards" that hits the funding and supposed falsehoods behind global warming skepticism.

Hannah was able to slam "false information" by the Koch brothers, compare herself to Martin Luther King, and call for the "eradication" of Citizens United during the interview. CNN completely ignored that the director and writer of her film, Craig Rosebraugh, was a fomer spokesman for eco-terrorist groups for years before abandoning his work.

At least The Oregonian newspaper took the trouble to provide such background context for the film that CNN ignored.

Man-made climate change skeptics have fared much worse than Hannah on CNN. For instance, on December 4 CNN host Piers Morgan teamed up with scientist Bill Nye against skeptic Marc Morano. Morgan even lectured his guest that "I respect that you have views. I don't think they're facts, and there are many scientists who would take issue with you about the use of the word 'fact.'"

On November 1, Morgan defended New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "very pertinent point" that Hurricane Sandy was probably brought about by global warming, and he again lectured skeptics that "it depends whether you believe the science or not."

Such hostility was nowhere to be found on Tuesday's Starting Point. Host Soledad O'Brien even promoted Hannah's documentary. "That's one of the most powerful lines.'They're in the business of selling doubt,'" she marveled at a movie line on global warming skeptics. "And it's that doubt that keeps this conversation, I think, about global warming going."

O'Brien prodded Hannah to deliver her activist message. "What was your personal interest in this? I mean, why climate change and environmental issues overall for you? You've gotten arrested because of your passion for some of these topics."

That teed up Hannah to compare her cause to that of Martin Luther King:   "Well you know first of all, I don't think that that's something that's really so bad. I mean, Martin Luther King was arrested 30 times before he was the age of 39 to right incredible wrongs. And we're at a time of extreme crises. I mean, we are facing a possible threat to our very life support systems."[note defense v mrc attack on actress and activist]

Hannah also claimed the Koch brothers spread falsehoods about global warming. "But then, yet, they will still funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that climate legislation isn't passed. That there's false information put out about the climate crisis and also about clean energy and its possibilities."

Those were only some of many claims Hannah made during the interview that CNN mostly left unchallenged. "It opens nationwide in theaters on Friday," O'Brien closed the segment promoting the film.

A transcript of the segment, which aired on Starting Point on March 5 at 8:49 a.m. EST, is as follows:

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Daryl Hannah has been with us all morning. She's also the executive producer of a new movie which is called "Greedy, Lying Bastards". It's causing some major buzz, not just for the name. The film takes a look at campaigns that deny climate change. Let's play a little clip.

(Video Clip)

MARC MORANO: We actually have had no significant warming.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The breakup of the ice at the North Pole is not unusual.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right. There is no scientific basis for alarm.

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC host: Are you guys funded in part by Exxon?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Verily, but why did you imagine that Exxon give you money?

Rep. HENRY WAXMAN (D-Calif.): The fossil fuel industries have an enormous amount of clout.

The Koch Brothers, for example, gave millions and millions of dollars to Republican efforts to not do anything to fight climate change.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They basically are in the business of selling doubt.

(End Video Clip)

O'BRIEN: That's one of the most powerful lines. "They're in the business of selling doubt." And it's that doubt that keeps this conversation, I think, about global warming going.

DARYL HANNAH, actress, activist: It's true because there is actually a consensus that it is happening. And that it is also human caused. However – and even, what's really interesting, is even Rex Tillerson from Exxon now has finally acknowledged that climate change is actually happening. Even the Koch Brothers I mean, you know, they will publicly come out and acknowledge it.

But then, yet, they will still funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that climate legislation isn't passed. That there's false information put out about the climate crisis and also about clean energy and its possibilities.

So while they – they want to, you know, not seem like idiots and say, well, nothing is happening when you can obviously it's so clear now. We've got epic droughts. I mean, unprecedented droughts in the Midwest, in our bread basket of our country. We've got wildfires and superstorms and floods. And I mean, Arctic ice sheets melting in unprecedented fashions, et cetera. It's impossible to deny those facts, simple facts. Like you put the pH strip in the ocean, it's 30 percent more acid than it ever it has been.

O'BRIEN: What was your personal interest in this? I mean, why climate change and environmental issues overall for you? You've gotten arrested because of your passion for some of these topics.

JOHN BERMAN: Many times.

O'BRIEN: Yeah. A handful of times.

HANNAH: Well you know first of all, I don't think that that's something that's really so bad. I mean, Martin Luther King was arrested 30 times before he was the age of 39 to right incredible wrongs. And we're at a time of extreme crises. I mean, we are facing a possible threat to our very life support systems.

I mean, a week and a half ago, the World Bank – the World Bank – who financed most of these large fossil fuel projects, you know, mega dams, et cetera, put out their own report on the climate crisis. And it was, like, the worst horror film I've ever seen in my life. It was the scariest scenario.

They said that if we raise the temperature of the earth four degrees Celsius, essentially it's total systems collapse, mass starvation, mass extinctions, disease. I mean the picture that they portray in their report was so horrifying that they had no choice but to make urgent recommendations to make radical changes, to stop fossil fuels immediately.

O'BRIEN: Do you think you're getting –

HANNAH: And that's from the World Bank.

CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY, Wall Street Journal: You know what's the takeaway here? What do you want people who watch the film to do when they leave the theater?

HANNAH: Well, to -- to hold these fossil fuel companies accountable. Because, see, I believe that they're – first of all, I believe Citizens United needs to be eradicated. This ruling that gave corporations the right of a person – because now politicians are doing the bidding of corporations and not doing – not doing representing us, we the people.

They're representing the corporations, because now corporations can give them money to their campaigns. They can, you know, basically send hundreds of lobbyists to make sure that they keep the pressure on so that the politicians are doing their will. And when that's all the messaging that they get, they're going to do it. You know, what did Upton Sinclair say? You know you can't – a guy is not going to do something when his salary depends upon him doing it.

ROLAND MARTIN, CNN contributor: Daryl how do you – how do you counter though, the economic argument. Because what happens in this country any time you try to propose any change, folks will say oh it's going to cost us billions. It's going to wreck the economy. We're going to lose jobs. And that all this causes somebody to go –

(Crosstalk)

O'BRIEN: Are you picking the environment over human beings and livelihood?

(Crosstalk)

MARTIN: Right, people go, oh, my God. We can't lose jobs.

HANNAH: Well here's – here's the deal. What we're talking about is protecting our ability to survive and our – and our vital life support systems. Now, there's a way to do that and still create jobs that are domestic jobs with safe, clean energy. And that's where we should be putting all of our resources. Not just allowing these companies who are essentially raping and pillaging our ecosystems because they are making record profits. Even in this economy.

The oil – the fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest industry in the history of money. In the history of money, and yet we're still paying, you know, through the roof just for our gallons of gas to go to, you know, to take our kids to school. It is unethical, it's wrong. And now we're going to extreme forms of extraction just to get that fuel because we've run out of the easy-to-get stuff. We have to blow up entire mountain tops. We're just decimating our oldest mountain range in the Appalachians.

MARTIN: I take it you're against Keystone.

HANNAH: The Keystone which is a – this is something I think we would all be united on because it's not a polarizing issue. It's a foreign company coming into our country, taking our farmers' and ranchers' lands through eminent domain, which is supposed to be only used for national security. But in this case, this pipeline which is going to be carrying corrosive tar sand sludge, it has to be pushed through at 150 degrees with toxic chemicals, is only going down to the Gulf of Mexico so that they can export it. They say that in their own documents. This is not for energy security for America. This is not going to affect our gasoline prices except for possibly to raise them, because the price per barrel that they can get down in the Gulf of Mexico to export is $20 higher a barrel.

O'BRIEN: The issue is a tough one.

HANNAH: And they try to confuse you. That's what it is.

O'BRIEN: Well that is –

(Crosstalk)

MARTIN: You're slightly passionate about this.

HANNAH: It's very infuriating. I mean, it's outrageous. It should be illegal to do what they do. It should be illegal.

O'BRIEN: The film is called "Greedy, Lying Bastards".

MARTIN: Cut right to the chase.

O'BRIEN: Yeah, it really does, doesn't it? Nice to have you talk about it. It opens nationwide in theaters on Friday.

-- Matt Hadro is a News Analyst at the Media Research Center

BMI

Published on Media Research Center (http://www.mrc.org)

Global Warming Censored

By

 Dan Gainor

March 3, 2008 - 6:32pm

See Executive Summary [1]

Correction Appended

So much for that job requirement of balance and objectivity. When it came to global warming the media clearly left out dissent in favor of hype, cute penguins and disastrous predictions.

"They [penguins] are charismatic, endearing and in serious trouble," warned NBC's Anne Thompson on the Dec. 12, 2007, "Nightly News." Thompson didn't include any disagreement.

While the networks had plenty of time to worry about the future of birds, most network news shows didn't take much time to include any other point of view even though hundreds of scientists have expressed skepticism of manmade climate change theory.

Another NBC reporter, Kerry Sanders, hyped the threat of warming to polar bears and walruses on Dec. 9, 2007, "a world scientists say may melt away by 2050." Sanders didn't include any scientists who disagreed with that claim.

The lack of balance on the issue prompted one network journalist, John Stossel of ABC, to do a story on the media's one-sidedness on '20/20" Oct. 19, 2007.

"You've heard the reports. The globe is warming. And it's our fault. And the consequences will be terrible. But you should know there is another side to this story," teased Stossel as he began his "Give me a Break" segment.

There is another side to the issue. In one story, Stossel interviewed four scientists critical of the so-called "consensus" on global warming. That's four more dissenting scientists than CBS put on its network in six entire months.

To better assess network behavior on this key topic, the Business & Media Institute examined 188 stories from ABC, CBS and NBC that mentioned "global warming" or "climate change" between July 1, 2007, and Dec. 31, 2007.

BMI found skepticism was shut out of a vast majority of reports. Overall, a measly 21 percent had any dissent at all referenced by a journalist or guest.

Skeptical voices were suppressed by the networks, outnumbered by nearly a 7-to-1 ratio by those promoting fear of climate change or being used by the network for the same purpose. CBS had an even worse record: nearly 38 proponents to one skeptic.

Lengthy segments like Scott Pelley's Oct. 21, 2007, "60 Minutes" story on "The Age of Megafires" certainly had time to include an alternative point of view to the notion that global warming is largely responsible for bigger, hotter fires in the American West. But Pelley skipped those voices - voices like a University of California Merced professor published on the Washington Spokesman-Review Web site about the California wildfires.

According to Alan Zarembo's Oct. 24, 2007, story, "Scientists said it would be difficult to make that case, given the combustible mix of drought and wind that has plagued the region for centuries or more. [2]"

Anthony Westerling, a UC-Merced professor and climate scientist, told Zarembo that the wildfires were the result of two "staples of the region's climatic history," meaning "strong Santa Ana winds" and "a drought that turned much of the hillsides to bone-dry kindling."

"Neither can be attributed to climate change," said Westerling.

The near blackout of skepticism on the networks didn't come as much of a surprise, since reporters like Pelley have been much more than onlookers in the story of global warming. In many cases they have become advocates - even going "to the ends of the earth" "to find evidence of climate change."

Ann Curry of NBC's "Today" made that clear on Oct. 29, 2007: "[O]ur mission, of course, is to find evidence of climate change."

When people with other views were mentioned, it sometimes came with a denigrating label like "deniers" or "cynics." Such critics were also portrayed as flat-earthers by journalists and guests. One person skeptical of manmade climate change, a Kentucky state representative, managed to get on the air but was treated to an exceptionally hostile interview by ABC's Bill Weir.

There were many other flaws in the reporting that created a very one-sided perspective. Journalists repeatedly phrased questions or made statements indicating human-caused warming was a fact, and they included opinions of politicians, movie stars, musicians and ordinary people like bankers instead of relying on scientists.

But according to Dr. Pat Michaels viewers would be better served by hearing both sides. "They would benefit from appreciating the true scientific diversity on the topic. The arguments against these gloom and doom global warming scenarios are much stronger than the arguments for them," Michaels told BMI.

Voices of Dissent: Missing

According to NBC's Brian Williams, "There's no shortage of folks out there saying it's [global warming is] not all that bad." Williams was teasing a "Nightly News" story on August 15 that included two other voices: Dr. Pat Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences [3], and Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute [4].

Williams was certainly right - there are hundreds of scientists [5] from around the world who question the global warming "consensus" - but in the news the latter half of 2007 you had to look hard to find them.

On the three networks, 79 percent of stories (149 out of 188) didn't mention skepticism or anyone at all who dissented from global warming alarmism. Williams' own network, NBC tied with CBS with roughly 85 percent of stories ignoring other opinions (NBC excluded dissent 76 out of 89 stories, CBS - 39 out of 46). ABC was the most balanced network, but still censored dissent from 64 percent of its stories (34 out of 53). The 113 casual mentions of global warming that BMI analyzed were not included in this calculation.

But dissent flourishes. The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee released a list [6] on Dec. 20, 2007, of more than 400 skeptical scientists from different fields - astrophysics, geology, climatology, meteorology and others. The release didn't even earn a news brief from one of the three networks as of Dec. 31, 2007.

Even when one show claimed it would represent a range of opinions on the issue, it didn't. On Oct. 30, 2007, NBC "Today" co-host Matt Lauer teased the upcoming "Ends of the Earth" broadcasts saying to Meredith Vieira, "And you're going to be interviewing all the experts talking about the issues of climate change." (emphasis added)

Vieira replied, "Absolutely. Getting into a whole debate, too, because some people believe there's an effect of climate change, others say not really. So we're going to discuss all of it and give viewers at home real tips on what you can do."

But on Nov. 5 and 6, 2007 as "Today" went to the "Ends of the Earth," the only "experts" Vieira spoke to were former vice president Al Gore, Chip Giller of Grist.org - a left-wing environmental Web site - and Katherine Wroth, co-author of "Wake Up and Smell the Planet."

Grist is an extreme publication. David Roberts of the environmentalist magazine called for "war crimes trials for these bastards ­- some sort of climate Nuremberg," [7] referring to the climate change "denial industry [8]." (Roberts later retracted [9] his comment, but not until it received a strongly negative response.)

The only skepticism of global warming "consensus" that came up was a brief mention by Vieira as she interviewed Gore. She asked Gore about John Christy, one scientist formerly with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who criticized Gore's predictions in an op-ed printed in The Wall Street Journal. Gore shot back calling Christy an "outlier."

Vieira didn't question Gore's remark or give Christy an opportunity to respond to the attack. Perhaps if she had, Christy would have echoed his remarks from the Nov. 1, 2007, Wall Street Journal [10]:

"I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never 'proof') and the coincidence that change in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time," said Christy.

He continued, "We [dissenting scientists] discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America."

'Deniers,' 'Hired Guns' and Hostile Interviews

Journalists practically drooled over Al Gore during Live Earth interviews and after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In contrast, people with alternative views barely got face time on the networks. Instead, they received insults and hostile questions.

The ugliest treatment of a skeptic was by Bill Weir on Nov. 18, 2007, "Good Morning America." He was interviewing Democratic state representative Jim Gooch from Kentucky.

Weir peppered Gooch with hardball questions and even attacked Gooch's motives:

"So what do you suspect these 4,000 or so scientists from 130 countries are up to? Do you accuse them [IPCC scientists] of lying? Do you think they're just all wrong? I should point out that your family is in business with the coal industry. You opposed a bill that would've stopped coal mines from exploding the tops of mountains and dumping waste into rivers there. So shouldn't you temper on your opinion on the environment?"

Gooch made it clear that he supported an open debate, saying, "[T]here is another side of the story. I think what we have is we have the problem of global warming about to become a political problem when lawmakers in Congress, when governors in states, when even the courts start to act in ways that are gonna affect the American people in severe ways." Gooch then mentioned the possible $6-trillion cost of one bill to deal with global warming.

"And what I wanna make sure that we do is that if we act, we have the science right," explained Gooch.

Weir wasn't satisfied: "But, but according to all these scientists, the more handwringing we do, the more we dither on this, the worse it's going to get. And what if you're wrong? What if this is, in fact, a global catastrophe? Isn't it a moral imperative as a public servant to err on the side of planetary survival and get something done?"

Instead of letting Gooch debate with someone who disagreed, Weir filled that role himself. He came across as a passionate advocate for "something" that would supposedly aid "survival," ignoring the cost, accuracy, and his supposed objectivity.

Journalists also called skeptics "deniers," conjuring images of Holocaust deniers, and cast them as flat-earthers - ironically forgetting that there was once a scientific consensus that the earth was flat.

When Gore attacked Dr. Christy [11] [who was mentioned by Meredith Vieira] on "Today" Nov. 5, 2007, Gore specifically compared people critical of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming to people who think the Earth is flat.

"Well, he's an outlier, he no longer belongs to the IPCC. And he is way outside the scientific consensus … There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat," said Gore.

Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made the same disparaging comparison on July 16, 2007 "Early Show" on CBS. After co-host Harry Smith said, "[I] asked why some people still don't believe we have a problem."

"Well, I think that there is [sic] still a lot of people that still think that the world is flat," said Schwarzenegger.

NBC's chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson said, "He is proudly a denier," of research professor and CATO senior fellow Dr. Pat Michaels.

Michaels told BMI, "She has no idea what she's talking about. I have written and spoken repeatedly in the last 15 years that human beings are responsible for most of the warming in the past century." What Michaels disagrees on is whether such warming will result in environmental catastrophe.

Recalling that NBC interview, Michaels continued, "The interview was great, but she pulled out one little piece and took it completely out of context. It was really, really disappointing. The interview was conducted in a very professional fashion, it was the editing that clearly did not reflect the tone and content of the overall interview."

Thompson actually included two dissenting views in that Aug. 15, 2007, "Nightly News" but undermined both their opinions by implying they were not experts and were only making trouble: "Climate experts say whether hired guns or honest dissenters, deniers are confusing the issue and delaying solutions."

A paltry 37 people expressing skepticism were included in six months of TV news coverage on the issue across three networks. That included all kinds of people like politicians or government employees, business representatives, celebrities, ordinary people and unidentified people. Only seven of them were scientists like Michaels.

CBS practically banned skeptics from its network, including only four and not a single scientist. The network seemed to adopt the mentality of CBS journalist Scott Pelley, who referred to global warming skeptics as "deniers" in March 2006 when he said, "If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?" [12] Recent "60 Minutes" segments from Pelley indicated he hasn't changed his mind about balanced journalism.

Those skeptical of the environmental impact of Gore's Live Earth concerts on July 7, 2007 also earned scorn from the media - even those like Bob Geldof who weren't questioning the science.

"[T]here have been cynics out there who question whether the artists are practicing what they preach," said NBC's Lester Holt on July 7, 2007 "Today."

You Call Them Experts?

ABC's Bill Weir claimed that "all the scientists" urge immediate action to stop global warming, but it wasn't just scientists the three networks relied on to make that case. Far from it.

There were politicians and government workers. Musicians like Madonna and Dave Matthews. Movie star Leonardo DiCaprio. And quite possibly, your next-door neighbor.

What those celebrities said had little to do with science and everything to do with advocacy. Singer KT Tunstall, a Live Earth performer, was quoted by ABC on July 7, 2007.

"I think I am an environmentalist. I mean, I don't have a car. I live in a small apartment," said Tunstall.

Madonna urged Live Earth attendees, "If you wanna save the planet, let me see you jumping up and down."

But it wasn't just globe-trotting stars telling people the planet was in danger and crowding out any other perspective.

Politicians offered perhaps more substance, but certainly not much more science than the Hollywood types. In addition to fawning over Gore, networks interviewed Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R), California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Independent), among others.

Reporters also relied on ordinary voices to reinforce the idea that global warming was already a major threat impacting our daily lives.

Only 15 percent of the people used to support global warming positions were scientists - identified as a "scientist" or with a specialty like genetics, ecology, biology or oceanography. A total of 71 scientists were included in six months of coverage. But networks turned to ordinary, unidentified people nearly a third more often than the scientists (101 to 71.)

Networks turned to ordinary people like two Live Earth concertgoers and the unidentified female "consumer" quoted by ABC "World News with Charles Gibson" on Sept. 14, 2007.

"You know, I think everybody's got to think about it. We've got to change," said a woman in a story about carbon labeling of food products.

Those quotes were used to underline the points that reporters made. One story on "Today" Nov. 6, 2007, warned that melting ice could kill off polar bears. Reporter Kerry Sanders included three unidentified people talking about polar bears - supporting his remark that "Worst-case scenario: If the Arctic ice continues to melt, in the next 100 years, the U.S. Wildlife Service says the only place you'll find a polar bear will be at the zoo."

Worries over Arctic melt flooded global warming coverage in the latter half of 2007, but as columnist John Tierney wrote in the Jan. 1, 2008 New York Times: "When the Arctic sea ice last year [2007] hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored."

No Need for Debate, Warming is 'Fact'

To many in the news media, global warming and its reported cause were already established fact. It was clear by the way some journalists talked about warming that they had accepted Gore's insistence that "the debate's over."

Just listen to CBS's Harry Smith: "Before we do anything else, there is, in fact, global climate change. It really affects some climates much more than others and it's really caused some real serious problems." Those serious problems Smith was talking about were allergies during a segment on the Aug. 7, 2007 "Early Show."

ABC's Sam Champion seemed to agree. Champion called the fourth U.N. IPCC report "definitive" on Sept. 5, 2007 and said he had been "investigating the alarming numbers of animals that are disappearing due to global warming" in July.

But Dan Harris went the farthest on Dec. 2, 2007 in a story about security risk and global warming. The "World News Sunday" host told viewers to "Think about this scenario: global warming contributes to a severe drought and food shortage in a third-world country. The government collapses. Warlords take over. America is forced to intervene."

Shockingly, Harris then claimed: "It's already happened, Somalia, 1993, with disastrous consequences."

Harris excluded expertise on the Somali situation or any context. Human Rights Watch, a liberal international organization, gave a very different perspective at the time of the crisis back in 1992:

"Somalia has historically been subject to famines, especially in the pastoral areas of the center and north … The current famine that threatens Mogadishu and south-central Somalia is radically different in origin and impact. Drought has played only a minor role [13], and the main victims are poor townspeople, farmers and rural laborers."

The ABC correspondent didn't include any statements about the way the war was thought to have contributed to the famine. [14]

Journalists weren't the only ones claiming that global warming was a fact, though. But the people journalists chose to interview also included Gore saying the "debate's over" and didn't dispute Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s incorrect statement that there was "zero dissent" on the issue, or Leonardo DiCaprio's assertion of a "90-percent consensus."

"Consensus" was rarely questioned by reporters at all, and ABC's Bill Weir even used the concept of "these 4,000 or so scientists" to hammer at one person expressing a different view.

The media did a terrible job of actually explaining what the IPCC was. Atmospheric scientist Dr. John Christy told Earth & Sky Web site [15] that the "IPCC would do well to define what each participant truly contributes to each product (i.e. Summary for Policy Makers vs. Full Text) so that the world would know that thousands of scientists never reached a 'consensus' on anything."

"When the Full Text is developed, 'consensus' is a concept held by the chapters' Lead Authors who often ignore or contradict positions offered by the Contributing Authors and Reviewers," explained Christy.

David Henderson, a former chief economist of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), wrote a detailed criticism of the IPCC in the Oct. 11, 2007 Wall Street Journal. He called the process "flawed" and biased because "the Panel members and those who appoint them are of course identified with the policies of their governments And virtually all governments are formally committed … to the 'stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere'."

"[T]his puts in doubt the accepted basis of official climate policies," [16] concluded Henderson.

It Don't Cost a Thing if It's Got That Climate Swing

Not only did the networks censor skepticism from stories, but the cost of proposed solutions, small or large, was routinely omitted.

BMI found that 90 percent of the stories didn't mention cost at all, even though the networks urged immediate action to stop the "climate crisis."

"NBC Nightly News" ignored cost in a Dec. 18, 2007 report about the recent energy bill passed by Congress.

"What America drives could change dramatically under the energy bill," said Anne Thompson before quoting David Hamilton of the left-wing environmentalist group Sierra Club.

Hamilton lauded parts of the bill during the "Fueling Change" segment: "This bill means that we will get all the same safety, all the same performance that we've ever gotten from our cars, but we'll get it with more miles to the gallon."

Thompson and Hamilton both ignored the obvious cost to auto manufacturers of designing vehicles that will be able to meet the new fuel efficiency requirements. Likely, those costs will be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher vehicles prices.

Other plans to curb greenhouse-gas emissions could cost trillions of dollars. One estimate by business consulting firm CRA International put a $4-trillion to $6-trillion price tag [17] on the Lieberman-Warner bill, which would mandate scaling back emissions levels to 1990s levels by 2020. That would cost each American man, woman and child $494 a year.

Network reporters also didn't focus on how much is already being spent. As the Business & Media Institute reported in its "Fire and Ice" study, more than 99.5 percent of American climate change funding comes from the government - taxpayers - and we spend $4 billion per year on climate change research.

The Kyoto treaty that was never ratified by the U.S. carried an estimated cost of $440 billion per year for America. The Senate voted 95 to 0 to reject it.

Methodology

BMI examined all ABC, CBS and NBC news transcripts that included the terms "global warming" or "climate change" during the most recent six month period - from July 1, 2007, to Dec. 31, 2007. Only stories mentioning those terms were included in the study.

The stories were split into two categories: stories and casual mentions. Casual mentions encompassed anchor briefs shorter than 50 words and longer stories that only mentioned global warming or climate change incidentally (the story was not about that issue).

"Dissent," for the purpose of this study, included any uncertainty ["I don't know"], alternative opinions about warming, and caution against making climate change policy decisions without more information. It also included criticism of "solutions" to global warming and "awareness" campaigns like Live Earth ­- even when the critic wasn't disagreeing with manmade climate change, but just the usefulness of worldwide rock concerts.

People quoted in a story that supported climate change claims were placed in the proponent category because their comments were used by the network to support the manmade global warming viewpoint. There was one exception. In one story, scientist Bill Nye presented both positions on the issue in a balanced manner. He was counted as neutral in that story.

Correction:Due to a tabulation error, the original version of this report said 80 percent of the stories lacked dissent. The correct number was 79 percent. The actual total of stories was 188. The CBS total was also misstated. The correct figure was 85 percent (39 out of 46). State Representative Jim Gooch (D-Ky.) was incorrectly identified within the report as Bill Gooch. BMI regrets the errors.

Resources

Fire and Ice: [18] Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can't decide 'weather' we face an ice age or warming.

Climate of Bias [19]: BMI's section dedicated to issues of climate change in the media

Skeptical Scientists [5]: A list of hundreds of scientists who question the science surrounding global warming alarmism.

Source URL: http://www.mrc.org/special-reports/global-warming-censored**

http://www.mrc.org/print/special-reports/global-warming-censored

---

===

new Cosmos:   Writing at the Media Research Center's Newsbusters blog, Jeffrey Meyer critiques a recent Tyson appearance on Late Night With Seth Myers. "Meyers and deGrasse Tysonchose to take a cheap shot at religious people and claim they don't believe in science i.e. liberal causes like global warming," writes Meyer.Over at the pro-"intelligent design" Discovery Institute, they're not happy. Senior fellow David Klinghoffer writes that the latest Cosmos episode "[extrapolated] shamelessly, promiscuously from artificial selection (dogs from wolves) to minor stuff like the color of a polar bear's fur to the development of the human eye." In a much more elaborate attempted takedown, meanwhile, the institute's Casey Luskin accuses Tyson and Cosmos of engaging in "attempts to persuade people of both evolutionary scientific views and larger materialistic evolutionary beliefs, not just by the force of the evidence, but by rhetoric and emotion, and especially by leaving out important contrary arguments and evidence." Luskin goes on to contend that there is something wrong with the idea of the "tree of life." Tell that to the scientists involved in theOpen Tree of Life project, which plans to produce "the first online, comprehensive first-draft tree of all 1.8 million named species, accessible to both the public and scientific communities." Precisely how to reconstruct every last evolutionary relationship may still be an open scientific question, but the idea of common ancestry, the core of evolution (represented conceptually by a tree of life), is not.

~ hayes doc

Tim Graham is the MRC’s Director of Media Analysis. He is responsible for supervising media analysts and researching and writing regular Special Reports on the news. In 1997 he created and served as editor of the *Media Reality Check*, a weekly blast-fax report on national news stories that are distorted or ignored. He now shares those duties with Research Director Rich Noyes.

In 2001 and 2002, Graham served as White House Correspondent for World, a national weekly Christian news magazine. He wrote cover stories on taxes, abortion, cloning, and other issues, asked questions at briefings with Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, and interviewed members of Congress and administration officials like then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

Graham is the author of the book *Pattern of Deception: The Media's Role in the Clinton Presidency* (Media Research Center, 1996), which critiques the media's coverage of Bill Clinton from 1991 through 1995. From 1989 to 1999, he was associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly and then bi-weekly newsletter of the MRC News Division, where he was responsible for the Study and Janet Cooke Award articles.

Seven of Graham's studies were published in *:{And That's The Way It Isn't::(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ A Reference Guide to Media Bias:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:* (Media Research Center, 1990). He also assisted in writing the book *How To Identify, Expose and Correct Media Bias* (MRC, 1994) and the broadcast news criticism section of Jude Wanniski's 1990 Media Guide. Eight of his essays on public broadcasting appeared in Public Broadcasting & the Public Trust (Second Thoughts Books, 1995). Other articles on media analysis have appeared in National Review,The Wall Street Journal,Reason,Human Events,Diversity & Division,Comint,Chronicles,The World & I,The Washington Times,World, Heterodoxy, and The Detroit News.

Graham is a regular talk-radio spokesman for the MRC and has made television appearances on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN,The 700 Club, and PBS'sThis is America with Dennis Wholey.

Before joining the Media Research Center, Graham served in Washington and St. Louis as press secretary for the campaign of U.S. Rep. JackBuechner (R-MO)in 1988, and in 1987, he served as editor of Organization Trends, a monthly newsletter on philanthropy and politics by the Washington-based Capital Research Center.Before coming to Washington in 1986, Graham served as a news reporter for the La Crosse (WI) Tribune and local radio stations in Wisconsin. Graham is a 1986 cum laude Honors Program graduate of Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minnesota, where he majored in political science and minored in mass communications, andfounded and edited the Bemidji Student Review, a conservative student newspaper.

recall that powell memo called for media monitoring, seems to be a sort of war room for rapid response?

eg attack on RS climate killers: http://www.mrc.org/articles/rolling-stone-attacks-climate-killers-derailing-efforts-curb-global-warming

commie muppets :

Last week, on the network's "Follow the Money" program, host Eric Bolling went McCarthy on the new, Disney-released film, "The Muppets," insisting that its storyline featuring an evil oil baron made it the latest example of Hollywood's so-called liberal agenda.

Bolling, who took issue with the baron's name, Tex Richman, was joined by Dan Gainor of the conservative Media Research Center, who was uninhibited with his criticism.

"It's amazing how far the left will go just to manipulate your kids, to convince them, give the anti-corporate message," he said.

"They've been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media, they hate the oil industry," Gainor continued. "They hate corporate America. And so you'll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was 'Cars 2,' which was another kids' movie, the George Clooney movie 'Syriana,' 'There Will Be Blood,' all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means for most people: fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don't want to tell that story."

Indeed, there was no mention of the benefits of oil drilling in the Muppets, but there was also no discussion of any other aspect of the industry. Richman, played by Chris Cooper, was out to destroy the Muppets theater. Kermit and his friends, then, were not committed environmentalists (though one must imagine the frog is concerned with his swampy homeland) but simply puppets looking to save a place they once loved.

Still, Gainor blamed the film, and its predecessors, for Occupy Wall Street and the environmental movement.

"This is what they're teaching our kids. You wonder why we've got a bunch of Occupy Wall Street people walking around all around the country, they've been indoctrinated, literally, for years by this kind of stuff," Gainor said. "Whether it was 'Captain Planet' or Nickelodeon's 'Big Green Help,' or 'The Day After Tomorrow,' the Al Gore-influenced movie, all of that is what they're teaching, is that corporations is bad, the oil industry is bad, and ultimately what they're telling kids is what they told you in the movie 'The Matrix': that mankind is a virus on poor old mother Earth."

The Teletubbies were unavailable for comment. Mahna-Mahna. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/05/fox-news-the-muppets-are-communist_n_1129173.html?ref=mostpopular

MEDIA FLAKS

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Media_Bias

newsbusters #1 gore Inc Truth link

The NewsBusters blog is a project of the Media Research Center (MRC). It has a goal to "provide immediate exposure of liberal media bias, insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely corrections to news media reporting."^[1]

NewsBusters was created in August 2005 with the guidance of Matthew Sheffield and Greg Sheffield, who operated the website :{RatherBiased.com:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: (now inactive), which criticized former :{CBS:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: Evening News anchor :{Dan Rather:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:.^[1] It is a group blog featuring both MRC employees and non-MRC writers.

NewsBusters also hosts a webcast called "NewsBusted," which it calls "the freshest comedy on the Web making fun of liberals and the media."^[2]

Personnel

• Matthew Sheffield - Editor
• Brent Baker - Editor At Large
• Tim Graham - Senior Editor
• Rich Noyes - Senior Editor
• Ken Shepherd - Managing Editor
• Noel Sheppard - Associate Editor

Contact Information

Website: http://www.newsbusters.org

Email: newsbusters AT mediaresearch.org

Articles and Resources

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} "About NewsBusters.org", NewsBusters, accessed February 2008.
2. ↑ "Two New Episodes Now Online of MRC's 'NewsBusted' Comedy Show", Media Research Center, November 2, 2007.

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Brent Bozell
• Cybercast News Service
• Mark Finkelstein

External links

• Terry Krepel, "NewsBusted", ConWebWatch, September 22, 2005.
• Terry Krepel, "Swing to the Right", ConWebWatch, August 29, 2006.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=NewsBusters"

Categories: Media | Blogging and Bloggers | United States

Media Research Center Inc. (MRC) is a conservative media watchdog group run by president and founder Brent Bozell. In 2006 the MRC had total revenue of $10.8 million^[1] and 50 full-time staff members. It is predominately funded by larger right-wing foundations (see below) with other comparatively minor sources of income from rental income and investments. In it's 2006 annual report, the group's founder wrote that MRC "continued to regularly provide intellectual ammunition to conservative activists, arming them with the weapons to fight the leftist press."^[2]

The MRC operates a number of subsidiary projects including the Business & Media Institute (formerly known as the the Free Market Project); CNSNews.com, a conservative news service; the NewsBusters blog; **:{TimesWatch:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:**, a website focusing on the New York Times; the Culture and Media Institute and the MRC Action Team.

(The Parents Television Council was founded in 1995 as a MRC project but, in 2000, was split off to become a separate legal entity. Brent Bozell, who founded the MRC, was president of both organisations until January 2007, when he resigned as President of the PTC but remains a member of the board of directors.^[3])

Mission statement

From MRC's website: "The mission of the Media Research Center is to bring balance and responsibility to the news media. Leaders of America's conservative movement have long believed that within the national news media a strident liberal bias existed that influenced the public's understanding of critical issues. On October 1, 1987, a group of young determined conservatives set out to not only prove - through sound scientific research - that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values, but also to neutralize its impact on the American political scene. What they launched that fall is the now acclaimed --- Media Research Center (MRC)."^[4]

Controversies

In November of 2000, MRC and a subsidiary, Parents Television Council (an advocacy group also founded and run by Mr. Bozell), were sued by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). MRC/PTC settled out-of-court for $3.5 million. See Parents Television Council for more information about this lawsuit.

In 1994, the MRC first printed the following excerpt from Howell Raines' book, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis:[1]

Then one day in the summer of 1981 I found myself at the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine. I was a correspondent in the White House in those days, and my work -- which consisted of reporting on President Reagan's success in making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white, and healthy -- saddened me....My parents raised me to admire generosity and to feel pity. I had arrived in our nation's capital [in 1981] during a historic ascendancy of greed and hard-heartedness....Reagan couldn't tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.

But the quotes were cobbled together from two different sections of the book; the span of the ellipsis between "hard-heartedness" and "Reagan couldn't tie" is 28 pages. Further, the statement "Reagan couldn't tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it" refers in context to Reagan's fly-fishing skills, not his IQ.[2] The MRC later appended a "clarification" putting the statements in their proper context.[3]

Criticism

Extra!, the magazine of the progressive media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, has criticized the MRC for selective use of evidence--the MRC had complained, for example, that there was more coverage of government death squads in right-wing**El Salvador**than in left-wing**Nicaragua**, without mentioning that there were roughly a thousand times more extra-judicial killings in El Salvador. Extra! also characterized the MRC as wanting to force out of the media any opinions that it disagreed with, even tracking the off-screen political comments of actors in a project that the magazine said "bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Red Channels, the McCarthy Era blacklisting journal." [4]

The liberal media watch group Media Matters for America has also repeatedly criticized the MRC, charging that they view the media "through a funhouse mirror that renders everything--even the facts themselves--as manifestations of insidious bias." [5]

Key personnel

• Brent Bozell, President and CEO
• Tim Graham, Director of Media Analysis
• Brent Baker, Vice President for Research and Publications, Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow
• Terry Jeffrey, CNSNews.com Editor-in-Chief
• Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business & Culture, T. Boone Pickens Fellow

Subsidiaries

• Business & Media Institute (formerly the Free Market Project)
• CNSNews.com
• NewsBusters
• TimesWatch
• Culture and Media Institute

Funding

• Exxon Mobil^[5]
• The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
• Sarah Scaife Foundation
• Castle Rock Foundation
• John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
• The Carthage Foundation
• JM Foundation[6]

Non-MRC media contact

The May 11, 2006, MRC press release "Public Demands Networks to 'Tell the Truth!' about Iraq War. Media Research Center delivers over 140,000 petitions demanding fair media coverage" directs inquiries to either Colleen O'Boyle or Tim Scheiderer at 703-683-5004 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              703-683-5004      end_of_the_skype_highlighting, which is the phone number for Creative Response Concepts of Alexandria, Virginia.

Contact information

Media Research Center

325 S. Patrick Street

Alexandria, VA 22314

Ph. (703) 683-9733 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (703) 683-9733      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

http://www.mediaresearch.org/

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Brent Bozell
• Parents Television Council

References

1. ↑ Media Research Center, "2006 Annual Report", Media Research Center, accessed February 2008.
2. ↑ L. Brent Bozell III, "A Message from L. Brent Bozell III", 2006, Annual Report, Media Research Center, accessed February 2008, page 3.
3. ↑ Parents Television Council, "PTC President Bozell Announces Decision to Step Down and Welcomes Tim Winter as New President", Media Release, September 1, 2006.
4. ↑ Media Research Center, "About the Media Research Center: Bringing Political Balance to the Media", Media Research Center, accessed February 2008.
5. ↑ "Factsheet: Media Research Center", ExxonSecrets website, accessed October 2009.

External resources

• "Media Research Center, Inc." profile at Media Transparency.

External articles

• Howard Kurtz, "Bias Watch," Washington Post, June 28, 2004 (scroll down to mid-page): Bozell's Media Research Center has raised $2.8 million for newspaper ads in 15 markets, billboards in 40 cities and a talk-radio blitz aimed at countering what he sees as a "liberal jihad" that is unfair to President Bush. The slogan (also on T-shirts and mugs) is not exactly subtle: A finger-pointing Uncle Sam declares: "Don't believe the liberal media!"
• Jeff Jarvis, "FCC -- and Media -- Duped by Brent Bozell's Complaint Factory," Buzz Machine, December 6, 2004.
• Bill Berkowitz, "Media Research Center Takes on *The West Wing*: Conservative Philanthropy-Supported Group Claims Show Had Liberal Bias", Media Transparency, May 22, 2006.
• Peter Hart and Steve Rendall, "Meet the Mythmakers", Extra!, July/August 1998.
• Paul Waldman, "MRC Studies That 'Prove' Media's 'Liberal Bias' Collapse Under Scrutiny", Media Matters for America, May 11, 2005.
• Terry Krepel, "Fairly Unbalanced", ConWebWatch, May 2, 2007. Details how appearances by MRC representatives on Fox News Channel tend to be solo, unbalanced, and the MRC spokespeople unidentified as conservative.
• Matthew Balan, "CNN Bashes Conservative Ads With 'Industry Insider,' Omits His Far Left Affiliation," Media Research Center, July 2, 2009.
• Laurie Bennett, "Conservative media monitor attracts the big bucks," Muckety.com, August 11, 2009.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Media_Research_Center"

Categories: Media | Politics (U.S.) | Conservatives

Cybercast News Service

From SourceWatch

Cybercast News Service (CNS) is a subsidiary of the conservative news monitoring group, the Media Research Center (MRC). Originally calling itself the "Conservative News Service," CNS changed its name to Cybercast in 2000.^[1]

History

CNS was launched on July 16, 1998, by founder Brent Bozell, as an "alternative news service" to mainstream news sources which reports by MRC claim have a "liberal bias."

CNS says it strives to "cover stories that are subject to the bias of omission and report on other news subject to bias by commission," and "endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story."^[2]

In September 2007, Terry Jeffrey, former editor of the conservative weekly Human Events, was named editor-in-chief, replacing David Thibault, who died earlier in the year.^[3]

Personnel

Current CNS personnel include^[4]:

• L. Brent Bozell III, President
• Terry Jeffrey - Editor-in-Chief
• Michael Chapman - Managing Editor
• Patrick Goodenough - International Editor
• Craig Bannister, Communications Director
• Eric Pairel, Chief Technology Officer
• Stuart James, Systems Administrator

Washington News Staff

• Melanie Hunter, Senior Editor
• Susan Jones, Senior Editor
• Randy Hall, Staff Writer/Editor
• Pete Winn, Senior Staff Writer
• Josiah Ryan, Staff Writer
• Fred Lucas, Staff Writer
• Kevin Mooney, Staff Writer
• Penny Starr, Staff Writer
• Nicholas Ballasy, Video Reporter

Foreign Bureaus

• Julie Stahl, Jerusalem Bureau Chief
• Sergei Blagov, International Correspondent
• Eva Cahen, International Correspondent
• Mark Mayne, International Correspondent
• Kevin McCandless, International Correspondent
• Stephen Mbogo, International Correspondent
• Deepak Mahaan, International Correspondent

Regular Columnists

• Terry Jeffrey
• Alan Caruba
• Michelle Malkin
• Ben Shapiro
• **Pat Buchanan**

Controversies

Iraqi Intelligence Service documents

On October 4, 2004, CNS reported that a "senior government official who is not a political appointee" provided CNS with 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents which were then translated from Arabic by two CNS translators. CNS reports that the official told them that the documents answer "whether or not Iraq was a state sponsor of Islamic terrorism against the United States. It also answers whether or not Iraq had an ongoing biological warfare project continuing through the period when the UNSCOM inspections ended."^[5] Details can be found at Cybercast News Service: Claim of Hussein's WMD, Ties to Al Qaeda.

False claim about Paul Begala

A July 15, 2005, CNS article claimed that Democratic strategist Paul Begala said that Republicans wanted to kill him and his family. ^[6] Begala vehemently denied this, claiming that when he said, "They want to kill me and my children if they can," he was referring to terrorists, not Republicans. ^[7] CNS refused to retract the claim, insisting that "[t]here was nothing unclear about what Begala said."^[8] Then-CNS editor in chief David Thibault challenged Begala for his "unmistakable and outrageous coupling of terrorists and Republicans."^[9]

Attack on John Murtha

A January 13, 2006, CNS article assailed the military record of Democratic Rep. John Murtha, a former Marine who has heavily criticized the Iraq war. The article quoted people who were either former political opponents of Murtha or who were dead or incapacitated casting aspersions on the two Purple Hearts Murtha earned while serving in the Vietnam War.^[10] The next day, the Washington Post repeated the article's allegations.^[11] Critics likened the CNS article to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks on the war record of Democrat John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign as another example of conservatives attempting to discredit the military credentials of Democrats in order to blunt their criticism of the Iraq war.^[12]

Contact details

Cybercast News Service

325 S. Patrick

Alexandria, VA 22314

Phone: 703-683-9733 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              703-683-9733      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Toll-Free: 877-CNS-NEWS begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              877-CNS-NEWS      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

URL: http://www.cnsnews.com/

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Cybercast News Service: Claim of Hussein's WMD, Ties to Al Qaeda
• Marc Morano
• Crosswalk
• GOPUSA
• Media Research Center
• Parents Television Council
• Swiftboating John Murtha
• Talon News

References

1. ↑ Terry Krepel, 'Journalistic Window Dressing", ConWebWatch, December 14, 2000.
2. ↑ "History", Cybercast News Service, accessed March 8, 2008.
3. ↑ "Terence Jeffrey Joins Cybercast News Service as Editor-in-Chief", Cybercast News Service, September 17, 2007.
4. ↑ "Staff contacts", Cybercast News Service, accessd March 2008.
5. ↑ Scott Wheeler, "Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties," CNSNews.com, October 4, 2004.
6. ↑ Jered Ede, ["Ex-Clinton Aide Charges Republicans 'Want to Kill Us' ",Cybercast News Service, July 15, 2005.
7. ↑ Paul Begala, "Right-Wingers Don't Want to Kill Me; Just Lie About Me", Campus Progress, July 20, 2005.
8. ↑ Randy Hall, "Begala Now Says Republicans Want to 'Lie About Us' ", Cybercast News Service, July 22, 2005.
9. ↑ David Thibault, "Paul Begala Needs a Lesson in Civility", Cybercast News Service, July 25, 2005.
10. ↑ Marc Morano and Randy Hall, "Murtha's War Hero Status Called Into Question", Cybercast News Service, Janaury 13, 2006.
11. ↑ Howard Kurtz and Shailagh Murray, "Web Site Attacks Critic of War Opponents, Question Murtha's Medals", Washington Post, January 14, 2006.
12. ↑ Bob Geiger, Why Do Republicans Hate America's Veterans?', Alternet, June 27, 2006.

External links

2002

• Terry Krepel, "The Aborted Debate", ConWebWatch, January 4, 2002.

2004

• George Putnam, "One Reporter's Opinion - Fraud on Every Front!" NewsMax, May 28, 2004: [CNS News "feeds" NewsMax]: "A day before this public news conference, I received a report from Scott Wheeler of CNS News. Scott told me of an Iranian man convicted of drug trafficking, also suspected of money laundering and smuggling people from Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Jordan into the U.S."

2005

• "Revealing More About Phony 'Voting Rights' Org, GOPUSA Runs CNS Story on GOP Front Group ACVR!," bradblog, March 31, 2005: "As it turns out, Hogenson -- the Founding and Executive Editor of CNS and also (no conflict at all here) the Radio Services Manager at the RNC Press Office! -- is the longtime compadre to one of the two known lead scheisters at ACVR, Jim Dyke. ... Dyke, who has worked hand-in-hand for years in his position at the RNC with Hogenson, was the 2004 RNC Communications Director."
• "Chart: Al-Qa`ida's WMD Activities," by Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Research Program at Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, May 13, 2005 (update). Cites: Scott Wheeler, "Evidence Points to Dirty-Bomb Plot," Insight Magazine (World Net Daily), October 29, 2003.
• Terry Krepel, "Prolonging the Lie", ConWebWatch, July 29, 2005.

2006

• Hunter, "The Murtha-Bashing Cybercast News Service Swarms with Pro-Exxon, Pro-Monsanto Reports, Quotes, and Commentary. Who's Paid to do What?" Political Cortex, January 16, 2006.
• Terry Krepel, "A Textbook Example of Conservative Journalism", ConWebWatch, January 18, 2006.

2007

• Terry Krepel, "Once and Future Bias", ConWebWatch, November 8, 2007.

2008

• Terry Krepel, "Planned Attacks", ConWebWatch, July 17, 2008.

GOPUSA News Service

• GOPUSA.com News web page.
• "New GOPUSA News Service, Cybercast News, Replaces Talon News; Now Embroiled in Scandal Over Flooding Google News With Identical Jeff Gannon Articles," The Nashua Advocate Blogspot, March 11, 2005.
• "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Brent Bozell Supplants Jeff Gannon As Man Most Likely to Be Accused of Involvement in Bush Propaganda Scheme," The Nashua Advocate Blogspot, March 11, 2005.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cybercast_News_Service"

Categories: Media | United States | Politics (US)

Cybercast News Service

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

The CNSNews.com (or Cybercast News Service), formerly called the Conservative News Service, is an American news website owned by the Media Research Center. ^[1]

[edit] Background

The site was founded on June 16, 1998 under the name "Conservative News Service", using the domain name conservativenews.org.^[2] Back then, it had a three-year budget of $5.46 million, funded entirely by private donations, and a staff of four reporters and two editors.^[2] It was later officially named the Cybercast News Service, CNSNews.com.

As of 2007, CNSNews.com described its role as serving an audience which puts a "higher premium on balance than spin" by covering stories that mainstream news organizations ignore.

"In response to these shortcomings, MRC Chairman L. Brent Bozell III founded CNSNews.com in an effort to provide an alternative news source that would cover stories that are subject to the bias of omission and report on other news subject to bias by commission. CNSNews.com endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story and debunk popular, albeit incorrect, myths about cultural and policy issues." ^[3]

CNSNews.com's motto is "The Right News. Right now."^[4]

CNSNews.com's editor from 1998-2005 was Scott Hogenson, who also worked as the chief of radio operations for the Republican National Committee in 2004. CNSNews.com has staff in Washington, D.C., London, Jerusalem and the Pacific Rim. Editor-in-chief David Thibault (deceased) became top editor in April 2005. He died on July 20, 2007.^[5]

:{Terence P. Jeffrey:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: became editor-in-chief in September 2007. Jeffrey was and remains an editor-at-large for the conservative weekly newspaper :{Human Events:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:. He wrote editorials for :{The Washington Times:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: from 1987-1991 and was research director for the presidential campaign of :{Patrick J. Buchanan:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: in 1992. Jeffrey was Buchanan's national campaign manager in his 1996 campaign.

[edit] Washington, D.C. News Staff

• Terry Jeffrey Editor-in-Chief
• Michael Chapman Managing Editor
• Melanie Hunter Senior Editor
• Susan Jones Senior Editor
• Pete Winn Staff Writer/Senior Editor
• Randy Hall Staff Writer/Editor
• Penny Starr Senior Staff Writer
• Kevin Mooney Staff Writer
• Fred Lucas, Staff Writer
• Josiah Ryan Staff Writer
• Nicholas Ballasy Video Reporter
• Jonathan Schulter Video Producer

[edit] Controversies

A July 15, 2005, CNS article claimed that Democratic strategist Paul Begala said that Republicans wanted to kill him and his family. ^[6]. (The article is no longer available on the CNS website, but it is summarized by SourceWatch^[7], and quoted in full on another website^[8].) Begala vehemently denied this, claiming that when he said, "They want to kill me and my children if they can," he was referring to terrorists, not Republicans. ^[9] CNS refused to retract the claim, insisting that "[t]here was nothing unclear about what Begala said."^[10][11] Then-CNS editor in chief David Thibault challenged Begala for his "unmistakable and outrageous coupling of terrorists and Republicans."^[12][13]

A January 13, 2006, CNS article assailed the military record of Democratic Rep. John Murtha, a former Marine who has heavily criticized the Iraq war. The article quoted people who were either former political opponents of Murtha or who were dead or incapacitated casting aspersions on the two Purple Hearts Murtha earned while serving in the Vietnam War.^[14] The next day, the Washington Post repeated the article's allegations.^[15] Critics likened the CNS article to the :{Swift Boat:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: Veterans for Truth attacks on the war record of Democrat John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign as another example of conservatives attempting to discredit the military credentials of Democrats in order to blunt their criticism of the Iraq war.^[16]

[edit] References

1. ^ Kurtz, Howard; Murray, Shailagh (January 14, 2006). "Web Site Attacks Critic of War". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/13/AR2006011301736.html. Retrieved October 21, 2009. 
2. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercast_News_Service#cite_ref-nyt98_1-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercast_News_Service#cite_ref-nyt98_1-1) Hafner, Katie (1998-06-18). "New Conservative News Site Will Fill a Void, Founder Says". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E6DF1E3DF93BA25755C0A96E958260. Retrieved 2008-07-28. 
3. ^ "History of Cybercast News Service". Archived from the original on 2007-08-18. http://web.archive.org/web/20070818184257/http://www.cnsnews.com/corporate/history.asp. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
4. ^ "Main Page". http://www.cnsnews.com. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
5. ^ "David Thibault, RIP: Farewell to a Friend". Archived from the original on 2007-09-04. http://web.archive.org/web/20070904114506/http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=/Commentary/archive/200707/COM20070720d.html. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
6. ^ "Ex-Clinton Aide Charges Republicans 'Want to Kill Us'". Archived from the original on 2007-08-16. http://web.archive.org/web/20070816231546/http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=/Politics/archive/200507/POL20050715a.html. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
7. ^ "False claim about Paul Begala". http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cybercast_News_Service#False_claim_about_Paul_Begala. Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
8. ^ "Ex-Clinton Aide Charges Republicans 'Want to Kill Us'". http://forums.cigaraficionado.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9426054/m/757107903. Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
9. ^ "Right-Wingers Don't Want to Kill Me; Just Lie About Me". http://www.campusprogress.org/features/406/right-wingers-dont-want-to-kill-me-just-lie-about-me. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
10. ^ "Begala Now Says Republicans Want to 'Lie About Us'". Archived from the original on 2007-05-21. http://web.archive.org/web/20070521015651/http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=%5cPolitics%5carchive%5c200507%5cPOL20050722a.html. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
11. ^ "Begala Now Says Republicans Want to 'Lie About Us'". http://www.gopusa.com/news/2005/july/0722_begalap.shtml. Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
12. ^ "Paul Begala Needs a Lesson in Civility". Archived from the original on 2007-05-20. http://web.archive.org/web/20070520223223/http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=%5cCommentary%5carchive%5c200507%5cCOM20050725a.html. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
13. ^ "Paul Begala Needs a Lesson in Civility". http://www.gopusa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22067. Retrieved 2009-10-02. 
14. ^ "Murtha's War Hero Status Called Into Question". Archived from the original on 2007-09-12. http://web.archive.org/web/20070912091254/http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=%5cSpecialReports%5carchive%5c200601%5cSPE20060113a.html. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
15. ^ Kurtz, Howard; Murray, Shailagh (2006-01-14). "Web Site Attacks Critic of War Opponents, Question Murtha's Medals". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/13/AR2006011301736.html. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 
16. ^ "Why Do Republicans Hate America's Veterans?". http://www.alternet.org/story/38145/?comments=view&cID=144586&pID=144362. Retrieved 2007-09-26. 

[edit] External links

• CNSNews.com
• Sourcewatch.org -- SourceWatch entry on CNSNews.com

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercast_News_Service"

Categories: Internet properties established in 1998 | Conservatism in the United States

The Media Research Center (MRC) is a conservative media watchdog based in Virginia. Founded in 1987, MRC seeks to expose liberal bias in the media. According to its website, MRCs mission is to bring balance to the news media.

MRCs products include the Cybercast News Service (CNSNews.com), a conservative news site; NewsBusters.org, a blog devoted to media criticism; the Business & Media Institute, which promotes conservative economic principles; and the Culture and Media Institute, which promotes traditional values in the media.

Funder : Purpose	Amount	Date
Armstrong Foundation	$155,500
Media education	$30,000	12/30/2007
Media education	$25,000	12/31/2006
Media education	$15,000	12/31/2005
Media education	$10,000	12/31/2005
"Tell the Truth" campaign	$25,000	12/31/2004
Free enterprise and media institute/Free Market Project	$10,000	12/31/2004
Free enterprise and media institute/Free Market Project	$5,500	12/31/2003
Free enterprise and media institute	$2,500	12/31/2002
Free enterprise and media institute	$2,500	12/31/2001
Free enterprise and media institute	$2,500	12/31/2000
Free Enterprise and Media Institute	$2,500	12/31/1999
Free Enterprise & Media Institute	$25,000	9/15/1998
Brady Education Foundation	$20,000
Project support	$15,000	1/1/1999
Project support	$5,000	1/1/1998
Carthage Foundation	$10,000
GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT	$10,000	1/1/1997
Castle Rock Foundation	$225,000
General operating support	$50,000	1/1/2005
General operating support	$50,000	1/1/2003
General support.	$50,000	1/1/2000
Analyzes and documents the left-wing bias of the media, then shares this information with the media, policy leaders, on the Internet, and through various meetings (usually with members of the media). Gives advice to other conservative organizations on how to market their message.	$50,000	1/1/1997
General operating; agency analyzes and documents liberal bias in the broadcast and print media, then shares this information with the media as part of an effort to bring balance to future news and entertainment programs	$25,000	1/1/1996
Charles G. **:{Koch :(style="color:#ed1c24"):}:**Charitable Foundation	$975
General operating support	$975	1/1/2004
Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation	$9,030
General operating support	$5,000	12/31/2007
General operating support	$4,030	12/31/2006
Exxon Mobil Corporation	$312,500
	$55,000	1/1/2008
	$55,000	1/1/2007
	$52,500	1/1/2006
	$50,000	1/1/2005
	$50,000	1/1/2004
	$50,000	1/1/2003
F.M. Kirby Foundation	$305,000
	$40,000	1/1/2007
	$35,000	1/1/2006
General support	$35,000	1/1/2005
General support	$35,000	1/1/2004
General support	$35,000	1/1/2003
General support	$35,000	1/1/2002
General support	$30,000	1/1/2000
General support	$30,000	1/1/1999
For The Conservative News Service and the Conservative Communications Center-$10,000	$30,000	1/1/1998
Gilder Foundation	$1,500
General support	$1,500	12/31/2003
Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation	$1,000
Program Support	$1,000	1/1/2006
Hickory Foundation	$210,000
Charitable	$25,000	1/1/2007
General Fund	$50,000	1/1/2002
General Fund	$25,000	1/1/2001
MRC Legal Defense Fund-General Fund	$10,000	1/1/2001
General Fund	$25,000	1/1/2000
General Fund	$50,000	1/1/1999
General Fund	$25,000	1/1/1998
JM Foundation	$60,000
	$20,000	1/1/2007
Toward educational programs	$25,000	1/1/2004
To launch the Parents' Television Council	$15,000	1/1/1996
John M. Olin Foundation	$495,000
The programs of the Media Research Center	$50,000	1/1/2001
The programs of the Media Research Center.	$50,000	1/1/2000
The Conservative News Service and general activities of the Center	$100,000	1/1/1999
Research and education projects on America's news and entertainment media	$100,000	1/1/1998
Research and education projects on America's news and entertainment media	$100,000	1/1/1996
The Free Enterprise & Media Institute	$50,000	1/1/1995
To support a study on "Free Enterprise, Government, and Television"	$25,000	1/1/1992
To support the research division	$10,000	1/1/1991
To support MediaWatch newsletter	$10,000	1/1/1990
John Templeton Foundation	$555,000
Institute on Culture, Media. Personal Responsibility, Character, and Values	$300,000	1/1/2007
Institute on Culture, Media, Personal Responsibility, Character, and Values	$200,000	1/1/2006
Report: Tort Reform Issues	$5,000	1/1/2006
Report: Tort Reform Issues	$45,000	1/1/2005
Free Market Project. Media bias about the food industry	$5,000	1/1/2005
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation	$1,380,000
To support general operations	$250,000	1/1/2007
To support general operations	$25,000	1/1/2007
To support the capital campaign	$250,000	12/16/2005
To support general operations	$25,000	5/10/2005
To support the capital campaign	$250,000	12/3/2004
To support the capital campaign	$250,000	12/12/2003
To support general operations	$150,000	12/13/2002
To support general operations of the Conservative Communications Center	$50,000	1/1/1999
To support general operations of the Conservative Communications Center	$50,000	10/9/1998
To support the Center's 1991-92 program activities.	$45,000	9/24/1991
To support the Center's library program.	$35,000	11/15/1990
Orville D. and Ruth A. Merillat Foundation	$50,000
General support	$25,000	2/28/2001
General support	$25,000	2/28/1999
Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation	$900,000
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$100,000	1/1/2007
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$200,000	1/1/2006
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$100,000	12/31/2005
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$100,000	12/31/2004
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$100,000	12/31/2003
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$100,000	1/1/2002
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$100,000	1/1/2000
Unrestricted Grant to General Fund	$100,000	1/1/1998
Roe Foundation	$11,500
General operating expense	$5,000	12/31/2006
General operating fund	$2,500	12/31/2005
General operating fund	$1,000	12/31/2004
General operating fund	$1,000	12/31/2003
General operating fund	$1,000	1/1/2002
General operating fund	$1,000	1/1/2001
Sarah Scaife Foundation	$2,842,000
General operating support	$500,000	1/1/2007
General operating support	$350,000	1/1/2006
General operating support	$350,000	12/31/2005
General operating support	$350,000	12/31/2004
General operating support	$350,000	12/31/2003
No comment provided	$150,000	1/1/2002
No purpose given.	$242,000	1/1/2001
No purpose given.	$300,000	1/1/2000
No purpose given	$100,000	1/1/1999
no description given	$150,000	1/1/1998
Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation	$92,000
	$50,000	1/1/2007
Public Policy	$20,000	1/1/2006
Toward MRC's Free Market Project	$10,000	1/1/2005
In support of the marketing campaign, Tell the Truth! 2004	$10,000	1/1/2004
America's Media Watchdog	$2,000	1/1/2003
William H. Donner Foundation	$342,246

Accuracy in Media (AIM) has grown from a one-person crusade to a million-dollar-a-year operation by attacking the mainstream media for abandoning the principles of "fairness, balance and accuracy" in its reporting. New Right philanthropies, think tanks and media support its work, and many members of its advisory board are former diplomats, intelligence agents and corporate directors.

Overview

AIM was founded by Reed Irvine in 1969, when Irvine called for sedition charges to be brought against Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the Progressive Labor Party, arguing, "If you're going to halt treason, you've got to do it while it's small." [*Village Voice*, January 21, 1986]

In the 1970s, Irvine endeared himself to the New Right by alleging that the corporate media were a propaganda tool for the Soviet KGB and Fidel Castro. In 1982, AIM attacked *New York Times* reporter Raymond Bonner for his reports (later proven accurate--see Extra!, January/February 1993) about the El Mozote massacre. Along with the *Wall Street Journal* editorial page, AIM succeeded in pressing the Times to pull Bonner from his Salvadoran beat.

:{[800 KIA civilians; :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre:

News of the massacre first appeared in the world media on January 27, 1982, in reports published by The New York Times^[13]and The Washington Post. Raymond Bonner wrote in the Times of seeing "the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles."^[13] The villagers gave Bonner a list of 733 names—mostly children, women, and old people—all of whom, they claimed, had been murdered by government soldiers.^[13][14]

Alma Guillermoprieto of the Post, who visited the village separately a few days later, wrote of "dozens of decomposing bodies still seen beneath the rubble and lying in nearby fields, despite the month that has passed since the incident ... countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column—poked out of the rubble."^[15]

Both reporters cited Rufina Amaya, a witness who had escaped into a tree during the attack. She told the reporters that the army had killed her husband and her four children, the youngest of whom was eight months old, and then lit the bodies on fire.^[13]

The conservative press-watch organization Accuracy in Media accused the Times and Post of timing their stories to release them just before the congressional debate; five months later, Accuracy in Media devoted an entire edition of its AIM Report to Bonner, in which its editor Reed Irvine declared that "Mr. Bonner had been worth a division to the communists in Central America".^[15] Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders attacked Bonner and Guillermoprieto before a Senate committee, stating that though there had been a battle between guerrillas and the army, "no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians." Enders also repeated the claim that only 300 people had lived in Mozote, making it impossible for the death toll to have reached that reported in the Times and Post stories.^[16] On February 8, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, told the committee that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas".^[17]Salvadoran army and government leaders denied the reports and officials of the Reagan administration called them "gross exaggerations."^[15] The Associated Press reported that "the U.S. Embassy disputed the reports, saying its own investigation had found ... that no more than 300 people had lived in El Mozote."^{[14]..apologized} ^in ^2011

In February, in an editorial titled "The Media's War", The Wall Street Journal criticized Bonner's reporting as "overly credulous" and "out on a limb". In Time magazine,William A. Henry III wrote a month later: "An even more crucial if common oversight is the fact that women and children, generally presumed to be civilians, can be active participants in guerrilla war. New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner underplayed that possibility, for example, in a much-protested January 27 report of a massacre by the army in and around the village of Mozote."^[15] U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton called Bonner an "advocate journalist".^[18] Bonner was recalled to New York in August and later left the paper.^[15]

Although attacked less vigorously than Bonner, Alma Guillermoprieto was also a target of criticism. A Reagan official wrote a letter to the Post stating that she had once worked for a communist newspaper in Mexico, a claim which Guillermoprieto denied.^[15]]]

Irvine later called for napalm to be used against FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador. (AIM Report, March 1990). During the Gulf War, he encouraged a nuclear strike against Iraq. [Seattle Times, January 16, 1991]

With the end of the Cold War, AIM now assails environmentalists as the "infiltrators" of the media establishment. Critical reports about industries that fund AIM--such as chemical and oil interests--ara a frequent target of AIM critiques.

During the Clinton era, alleged conspiracies related to the Democratic president were a frequent topic in AIM's work--particularly the notion that Vince Foster was not a suicide but a victim of foul play. AIM charged that Republicans, including independent counsel Kenneth Starr, were somehow complicit in covering up Clinton's plots; discussing Hillary Rodham Clinton's notion of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," Irvine retorted that "the only conspiracy I knew of was the conspiracy of the Republican leadership to protect Bill Clinton." [AIM Report, February 1998]

AIM has been criticized as a censorious group eager to silence voices it disagrees with and disdainful of the First Amendment. The group for a time offered as a donation premium Target America, written by AIM board member James L. Tyson, a book advocating that government "ombudsmen" police major-network newscasts for "accuracy" and "fairness". [1]

Reed Irvine suffered a stroke in 2003 and died in November 2004. His son, Don Irvine, succeeded him as AIM chairman.

In October 2008, AIM launched a website promoting a boycott of the New York Times, edited by Don Feder.^{[1]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Accuracy_In_Media#cite_note-0)

AIM operates Accuracy in Academia, founded in 1985 as an outgrowth of AIM. AIM also operates the American Journalism Center, which it describes as "an intense internship training program for aspiring journalists and students seeking careers in the public relations and/or marketing fields. Most of our interns will work in the offices of Accuracy In Media and Accuracy In Academia for the duration of their internship."^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Accuracy_In_Media#cite_note-1)

Personnel

Board of Directors (2009)^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Accuracy_In_Media#cite_note-2)

• Don Irvine, Chairman (also heads Parents and Grandparents Alliance)

...

• Bethlehem Steel
• Carthage Foundation; see Scaife Foundations
• Chevron
• Ciba-Geigy
• Coors Foundation
• Dressor Industries
• Exxon
• Lawrence Fertig Foundation
• Getty Oil
• Horizon Oil and Gas
• IBM
• Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical
• F.M. Kirby Foundation
• Mobil Foundation
• Pepsico
• Phillips Petroleum Company
• Smith Richardson Charitable Trust; also see Smith Richardson Foundation
• Texaco Philanthropic Foundation
• Union Carbide

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Media_Research_Center

*Extra!*, the magazine of the progressive media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, has criticized the MRC for selective use of evidence--the MRC had complained, for example, that there was more coverage of government death squads in right-wing El Salvador than in left-wing Nicaragua, without mentioning that there were roughly a thousand times more extra-judicial killings in El Salvador. Extra! also characterized the MRC as wanting to force out of the media any opinions that it disagreed with, even tracking the off-screen political comments of actors in a project that the magazine said "bore an uncomfortable resemblance to *Red Channels*, the McCarthy Era blacklisting journal." [4]

The liberal media watch group Media Matters for America has also repeatedly criticized the MRC, charging that they view the media "through a funhouse mirror that renders everything--even the facts themselves--as manifestations of insidious bias." [5]

Key personnel

• Brent Bozell, President and CEO

Right-wing pedigree

Media Transparency describes^{[5]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Brent_Bozell#cite_note-Media-4) L. Brent Bozell III as "a zealot of impeccable right-wing pedigree. He is the nephew of columnist William F. Buckley and the son of L. Brent Bozell, Jr., who assisted Barry Goldwater with the writing of Conscience of a Conservative. He was the chief fund-raiser behind Pat Buchanan's unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1992."

Smear campaigns

According to Media Transparency, Bozell helped orchestrate the smear campaign directed at the opposition to Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991. During the 2004 elections Bozell launched a 2.8 million dollar campaign to discredit^{[6]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Brent_Bozell#cite_note-5) the "liberal media".

Bozell's August 29, 2004, column^{[7]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Brent_Bozell#cite_note-6) on the eve of the Republican National Convention attempted to smear John Kerry by accusing him of "soldier-smearing", for having reported, during his 1971 Congressional testimony, on atrocities being committed in Vietnam.

run by Bozell, co author with buckley  Big Lies  36

6 mil annaul budget

aim 3, MRC 2, Ctr for Media and Public Affairs #1 L-N hits 38

http://en.:{wikipedia:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.org/wiki/**Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs**

CMPA's signature activity is its "rapid response" studies of media coverage of current issues, which appear quickly enough to influence ongoing public debates, such as presidential campaigns, Senate confirmation hearings, and major policy debates in Congress.^{[^^11]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-10)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-11)^{12]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-11)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-12)^{13]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-12)

Although CMPA avoids taking stands on political issues, its studies have sometimes become part of the public debate over the media's role in politics and society. For example, in 1992 a CMPA study found that the average length of a presidential candidate's soundbite on the evening news had dropped to less than ten seconds, down from 42 seconds in 1968. In response CBS adopted a policy requiring longer soundbites on the CBS Evening News.^{[^^14]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-13)Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky note that the CMPA, along with several other nonpartisan non-profit organizations, help to police the media through the creation of "flak," which they define as "negative responses to a media statement or program" and which they maintain is part of a project of "disciplining the media." ^{[^^15]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-14)

CMPA studies of entertainment media have been used by members of the United States Congress such as Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) in their efforts to reduce gratuitous violence and sex in television entertainment.^{[^^16]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-15) CMPA's research on entertainment media has also included studies of how various groups have been portrayed on television, such as studies of Hispanic Americans' portrayals commissioned by the National Council of La Raza and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.^{[^^17]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-16)

[edit] Funding

The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has challenged CMPA's non-partisan claim, based on the argument that much of its funding has come from conservative sources, and that its founder, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, once held a chair in mass communications at the American Enterprise Institute and was a Fox News contributor.^{[^^18]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-17)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-18)^{19]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-18) After a Washington Post article referred to CMPA as "conservative," the Post published a "Clarification," which concluded, "The Center describes itself as nonpartisan, and its studies have been cited by both conservative and liberal commentators."^{[^^20]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-19)

Progressive organization MediaTransparency (now run by Media Matters for America, itself a liberal organization^{[^^21]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-SourceWatchMMFA-20)) documented that between 1986 and 2005 CMPA received 55 grants totaling $2,960,916 (unadjusted for inflation). The organization, which collated information from returns filed by numerous conservative foundations, claimed that 86% of CMPA's total funding came from conservative-leaning foundations.^{[citation needed]} In response to Media Transparency's claims, CMPA posted on its website a listing of $1,766,500 in grants received from 19 "non-conservative" and centrist foundations and non-profit organizations. ^{[^^22]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-21)

^---^

^SW

Foundation funding

Media Transparency documents that between 1986 and 2005 CMPA received 55 grants totaling $2,960,916 (unadjusted for inflation).^{[6]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-5) The data reveals that the overwhelming proportion of CMPA's funding comes from conservative foundations.

The funding information, covering 1986-2005, lists the following donors (note: all figures are unadjusted for inflation):

• Carthage Foundation, part of the Scaife Foundations - $512,000 from 8 donations
• the Earhart Foundation contributed $120,000 in six grants between 1999 and 2003;
• John M. Olin Foundation - $730,000 from 15 donations between 1986 and 2001;
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation - $250,000 nine grants over the period between 1989 and 1995;
• Sarah Scaife Foundation, part of the Scaife Foundations - $760,000 from 9 donations spanning the period between 1991 and 2003; and
• Smith Richardson Foundation - $416,916 from 3 donations between 1998 and 2001;

Thus, out of the total of $2,960,916 in foundation grants, nearly all of it ($2,668,916) came from just four sources: the John M. Olin, Scaife, and Smith Richardson foundations. In other words, CMPA received 86% of its foundation funding from those four donors. Here is a sample of other right-wing causes funded by these 3 donors, as listed by their respective SourceWatch articles:

• John M. Olin Foundation - American Enterprise Institute, Project for the New American Century
• Scaife Foundations - American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation
• Smith Richardson Foundation - American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute

According to Salon journalist Joe Conason, the availability of this information does not indicate an openness on the part of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. In a Jan 2003 exchange of views with Lichter, Conason said "The IRS form 990 returns filed by [Lichter's] center redacts the names of all the individuals and organizations that contribute to it, thereby concealing them from public scrutiny. But the watchdogs at Media Transparency have collated the 990 returns filed by the conservative foundations, which disclose their contributions to Lichter's outfit."^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs#cite_note-Conason-2)

As at February 2008, the CMPA website contains no information about the Center's sources of funding.

Personnel

Office Bearers

• S. Robert Lichter, President,
• David Gergen, Director

Baker is the Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow and Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center (MRC), has been the central figure in the MRC’s News Division since the MRC’s 1987 founding. In late 2001, Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnesdubbed Baker "the scourge of liberal bias."

For 13 years, Baker compiled and edited the daily CyberAlert, an often-cited, daily e-mail and online report on national media coverage of politics he created in 1996. In late May of 2009 the CyberAlert became an e-mail-only product based on *BiasAlert*postings on the MRC's Web site. More than 40,000 people subscribe, including influential media and political figures. In June of 2005, CyberAlert reached its 2,000th edition with an issue highlighting the 20 most humorous items from the first nine years.

Baker spearheaded the MRC's launch, in August 2005, of the NewsBusters.org blog for which he now serves as Editor. Checkherefor his blog postings.Follow Baker via Twitter.

He also serves Editor of Notable Quotables, a two-page newsletter which delivers a bi-weekly compilation of quotes from the liberal media which reflect biased reporting. From 1988 to 1999 he also oversaw MediaWatch, a monthly and later bi-weekly newsletter which the MRC discontinued in order to concentrate efforts on more timely analysis via the Internet... off bio

NEWSBUSTERS

Executive Editor

Matthew Sheffield

Editor at Large

Brent Baker

Senior Editors

Tim Graham

Rich Noyes

Managing Editor

Ken Shepherd

Associate Editor

Noel Sheppard

Contributing Editors

Tom Blumer

Geoffrey Dickens

Dan Gainor

David Limbaugh

Mithridate Ombud

Clay Waters

Scott Whitlock

Senior Contributor

Mark Finkelstein

Contributing Writers

Matthew Balan

Michael M. Bates

Erin R. Brown

Jack Coleman

Kyle Drennen

Douglas Ernst

P. J. Gladnick

Stephen Gutowski

Matt Hadro

D. S. Hube

Kathleen McKinley

Dave Pierre

Amy Ridenour

Julia A. Seymour

Terry Trippany

Rusty Weiss

Brad Wilmouth

Publisher

Brent Bozell

Site Design

Dialog New Media

NewsBusters

Jump to: navigation, search

The NewsBusters blog is a project of the Media Research Center (MRC). It has a goal to "provide immediate exposure of liberal media bias, insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely corrections to news media reporting."^[1]

NewsBusters was created in August 2005 with the guidance of Matthew Sheffield and Greg Sheffield, who operated the website RatherBiased.com (now inactive), which criticized former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather.^[1] It is a group blog featuring both MRC employees and non-MRC writers.

NewsBusters also hosts a webcast called "NewsBusted," which it calls "the freshest comedy on the Web making fun of liberals and the media."^[2]

Personnel

• Matthew Sheffield - Editor
• Brent Baker - Editor At Large
• Tim Graham - Senior Editor
• Rich Noyes - Senior Editor
• Ken Shepherd - Managing Editor
• Noel Sheppard - Associate Editor

Contact Information

Website: http://www.newsbusters.org

Email: newsbusters AT mediaresearch.org

Articles and Resources

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} "About NewsBusters.org", NewsBusters, accessed February 2008.
2. ↑ "Two New Episodes Now Online of MRC's 'NewsBusted' Comedy Show", Media Research Center, November 2, 2007.

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Brent Bozell
• Cybercast News Service
• Mark Finkelstein

External links

• Terry Krepel, "NewsBusted", ConWebWatch, September 22
• # NewsBusted

The Media Research Center starts a blog -- which is just as biased and questionably sourced as the regular MRC stuff.

By Terry Krepel_{

}_Posted 9/22/2005

What a difference a year makes.

In July 2004, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell was mocking the bloggers and other online sources (including ConWebWatch) used by David Brock in his book "The Republican Noise Machine," smearing them (and us) as "fringe radical left-wing activists." (Full disclosure: I work for Brock's Media Matters for America. And the challenge still stands for Bozell to name anything at ConWebWatch that is "fringe radical left-wing activist.")

Now, the MRC has its own blog -- NewsBusters, with the slogan "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias," launched in early August. The MRC hired Matthew Sheffield and Greg Sheffield, brothers who were behind the Dan Rather-bashing site RatherBiased.com, to run it. The MRC claims that NewsBusters' goal is "to have NewsBusters play a leading role in blog media criticism by becoming the clearinghouse for all evidence of liberal media bias by joining to this formidable information store the contributions of already-established netizens as well as those who want to join in the web revolution." Indeed, many of NewsBusters' contributors aren't MRC employees (though the usual suspects, such as Tim Graham and Brent Baker, post regularly).

• And therein lies a problem. Some of NewsBusters' contributors are so eager to smear that distortions and outright falsehoods make their way in -- which is surprising since you'd think that the MRC would want to enforce some sort of standard of accuracy on its contributors.

We got a glimpse of what to expect from NewsBusters in the first few days of its operation with its biased sendoffs for dead journalists. It served up headlines like "Pro-war Iraq journalist Steven Vincent, RIP" ("Unlike many (most?) journos covering the war in Iraq, Vincent supported the invasion," poster Clay Waters of MRC's TimesWatch noted) and "David Shaw, RIP" (Shaw wrote a series claiming that news coverage of abortion was tilted toward the "pro-choice" view), the death of ABC's Peter Jennings got only the headline "Peter Jennings Dies" and no "RIP" tag.

• One offender is Vinny Fiore. In an Aug. 10 post making a NewsMax-like defense of Jeanine Pirro, candidate for Hillary Clinton's New York Senate seat and, thus a conservative darling -- ConWebWatch has already documented NewsMax's love affair with Pirro -- misleadingly describes what President Clinton did in his Whitewater investigation-related testimony: "It is common knowledge that what Clinton did was commit perjury before a Grand Jury." Well, no. Perjury has a specific legal definition, and to be a perjurer, one must have been convicted of perjury. Lying under oath is not necessarily perjury. As Fiore himself later writes, Clinton was found in civil contempt of court, not perjury.

Another Fiore post, from Aug. 28, claims that antiwar protesterCindy Sheehanis "insisting" that "America is not a country worth dying for." But those aren't the words she said; rather, she said, "This country is not worth dying for," and there's evidence that the country Sheehan was talking about was Iraq, not the United States.

If this seems like nitpicking, note that later in his post, Fiore engages in similar hair-splitting, berating Sheehan for making what he called "obvious misstatements" about President Bush. After quoting Sheehan as saying that Bush "always said that if you are not for us, you are against us," Fiore adds: "Bush has never said the above in relation to the American public. He has always said, though, to governments that do not take a proactive hand in defeating terrorism, that 'Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorist [sic].'"

A Sept. 4 post by Fiore follows the Bush party line in bashing Reuters for daring to suggest Bush has any responsibility for the Katrina aftermath. He concludes: "It is why sites like NewsBusters, and the site that led me to this story, Little Green Footballs, are so integral to getting the facts as they exist."

ConWebWatch has previously noted Fiore's erroneous, alarmist claims that run contrary to "the facts as they exist" about Social Security.

Speaking of following the Bush party line, a Sept. 15 post by Noel Sheppard ("an economist, business owner and contributing writer for the Free Market Project," operated by the MRC) claimed that a Newsweek article "offered some dubious and misleading conclusions about America’s poverty rate" by noting that "after a decade of improvement in the 1990s, poverty in America is actually getting worse." As a rebuttal, Sheppard cited a report Sheppard wrote for the Free Market Project that heavily spun poverty numbers to make President Bush look good. "[T]he 2004 Census Bureau survey indicated that poverty in America is actually lower than the average rate achieved during the decade of the '90s," Sheppard wrote.

By comparing current poverty rates to a 10-year average of the 1990s, Sheppard obscures the fact -- also depicted in the census data -- that the poverty rate went down each year of the Clinton presidency and has increased each year of Bush's presidency. In other words, Newsweek was telling the truth, and Sheppard didn't want anyone to know it.

Sheppard has been promoting his new favorite pollster, Rasmussen Reports. In a Sept. 17 post citing a Rasmussen poll putting President Bush's approval rating several points higher than the record-low ratings cited by other pollsters, Sheppard claimed that "few media outlets pay attention to the poll conducted on a daily basis by Rasmussen Reports. Could it be that Rasmussen's numbers don't mirror the negativity of the other polling groups?" In a Sept. 18 post, Sheppard claims that "regardless of how accurately Rasmussen Reports predicted the 2004 election results, America's media continue to ignore their polling data."

As ConWebWatch has detailed, the reason Rasmussen doesn't get much mainstream play is that it produces conservative-skewed results, having been promoted by the likes of WorldNetDaily. That conservative-friendly 'tude is, presumably, the real reason Sheppard is so infatuated with Rasmussen.

Sheppard's defensive mechanisms are a reminder of what the MRC is ultimately all about: Protecting Republicans comes before telling the truth.

How far into the tank for Bush is NewsBusters? It's perhaps the only place where you'll read a defense of slow-to-react, thinly qualified (and eventually ousted) FEMA head Michael Brown. A Sept. 9 post by "political commentator" Dustin Hawkins takes issue with a Time magazine piece on Brown:

While accusing Brown of both padding his resume and having no emergency management expience [sic] prior to becoming FEMA head, TIME simply doesn't acknowledge his work as having "served as FEMA's Deputy Director and the agency's General Counsel. Shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Mr. Brown served on the President's Consequence Management Principal's Committee, which acted as the White House's policy coordination group for the federal domestic response to the attacks." Nor does TIME mention his handling of some 150+ handling of other declared disasters and emergencies prior to Hurricane Katrina and the job he did.

The NewsBusters denizens are as eager to smear liberals as they are to rush to Bush's defense. An Aug. 26 post by Dan Gainor (whose day job is director of the MRC's Free Market Project) implies that concerns that a mercury-based preservative in children's vaccines are linked to autism are merely "radical environmentalist claims" and a "left-wing crusade." In fact, articles at NewsMax and WorldNetDaily -- not known for being radical environmentalists -- have also advanced the claim.

For instance, a June 2003 WND article, reproduced from the late Moonie-owned magazine Insight (also not known for radical environmentalism), claimed that "vast majority of finger-pointing [about the causes of autism] has been directed at childhood vaccines as the culprit." And an April 2003 NewsMax column by Michael Arnold Glueck and Robert J. Cihak -- Cihak is a past president of the conservative Association of American Physicians and Surgeons -- quoted a study that found "a strong correlation ... between dosage of thimerosal from childhood vaccines and the incidence of autism, speech disorders, and cardiac arrest."

Of course, there's the requisite bashing of the mainstream media (or MSM in conservative parlance). Greg Sheffield was quick to bash CBS News' attempt at starting a blog, insisting in a Sept. 12 post that it "will devolve into a way for CBS to finally respond to charges made against it in the blogosphere." Sheffield doesn't say why it's a bad thing for CBS to have a blog-like forum to respond to bloggers.

Tim Graham commented in an Aug. 29 post on labeling at the Washington Post: "Ever notice how liberals like the Posties won't use 'pro-life' too much, because that would be calling the liberals 'anti-life'? Or they use 'anti-abortion,' but almost never 'pro-abortion'?"

Has Graham ever looked down the hall at his colleagues at CNSNews.com? A CNS article that very day used the terms "pro-abortion" and "pro-lifers" -- the same (though reversed) type of labeling bias Graham accuses the Post of engaging in (and ConWebWatch has documented). You'd think that since they're all in the same building, Graham would have better luck convincing his CNS co-workers to avoid engaging in labeling bias.

Of course, Graham is a senior editor for NewsBusters, and we see no inclination that he has enforced any sort of standards there beyond the MRC mantra of running defense for Bush and screaming "liberal bias!" on a regular basis.

And we haven't said a thing until now about "Gaggle," Greg Sheffield's comic strip that not only trades in lame liberal stereotypes, it has forgotten the basic mission of a comic strip: being funny.

, 2005.

• Terry Krepel, "Swing to the Right", ConWebWatch, August 29, 2006.

Categories:

• Media
• Blogging and Bloggers
• United States

bs 

Rich Noyes, the MRC’s Research Director and a senior editor at NewsBusters.org, is responsible for supervising media analysts and researching and writing MRC Special Reports. He is also one of the editors of Notable Quotables, MRC’s bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media, and theMedia Reality Check, MRC's regular report on stories that the media distort or ignore.

After joining the MRC in 1999, Mr. Noyes co-edited, with economist Stephen Moore,Dollars & Nonsense: Correcting the News Media's Top Economic Myths, a book of essays by leading economists designed to illustrate and correct the economic illiteracy pervading much of the liberal media. He has written several in-depth studies on media bias, including:

• TV's Tea Party Travesty: How ABC, CBS and NBC Have Dismissed and Disparaged the Tea Party Movement
• Better Off Red? Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Recalling the Liberal Media's Blindness to the Evils of Communism
• Cheerleaders for the Revolution: Network Coverage of Barack Obama’s First 100 Days
• Obama’s Margin of Victory = The Media: How Barack Obama Could Not Have Won the Democratic Nomination Without ABC, CBS and NBC
• The Media vs. The War on Terror: How ABC, CBS, and NBC Attack America’s Terror-Fighting Tactics as Dangerous, Abusive and Illegal
• TV’s Bad News Brigade: ABC, CBS and NBC’s Defeatist Coverage of the War in Iraq
• :{The Liberal Media: Every Poll Shows Journalists Are More Liberal than the American Public:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ — And the Public Knows It:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:
• Clamoring for Kyoto: The Networks One-Sided Coverage of Global Warming

Mr. Noyes has discussed the media’s liberal bias on the Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC and a variety of radio talk shows, and has authored articles which have appeared in the New York Post, Investor’s Business Daily and Human Events.

Before he arrived the Media Research Center, Mr. Noyes studied the media at the Center for Media and Public Affairs, where he co-authored two books: The Video Campaign: Network Coverage of the 1988 Primaries, and Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Journalism, published in 1995. He has also written for the Journal of Political Science, the American Enterprise, Forbes MediaCritic, and Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper.

A native of Agawam, Massachusetts, Mr. Noyes obtained a bachelor’s degree in political science from the George Washington University in 1987, and earned a master’s degree from Georgetown University in 1990. He currently lives in Falls Church, Virginia.

http://archive.mrc.org/bmi/about/about.aspx

spinoff

About the Business and Media Institute

“Finally there is an organized effort to put an end to the embarrassing media bias against the free market – and we can thank the folks at BMI for it. From oil price reality checks to the underreported success of the most recent tax cuts, Business & Media Institute gets it done.”

• Vicki McKenna, host, “Upfront w/Vicki McKenna”

News/Talk 1310 WIBA, Madison, Wis.

Journalists are challenged every day to make sense of complicated business and economic issues. The Business & Media Institute (formerly the Free Market Project) aims to help the media do that essential job as well as possible and to monitor their performance.

According to a survey by the National Council on Economic Education, 79% of Americans get the majority of their economic information from television. The study determined that an astounding 61% of the general public could not answer questions about basic economic concepts. These results show that most Americans do not understand or appreciate our nation's dynamic free enterprise system. Unfortunately, the single most powerful cultural force in America – the news and entertainment media – often don't either. Even good journalists, who are bombarded with mountains of information daily, need a helping hand to have an informed understanding of our nation’s free enterprise system.

Before the Media Research Center (MRC) launched the Business & Media Institute (BMI) in 1992, there was no entity in America devoted solely to analyzing and exposing the anti-free enterprise culture of the media. With the BMI in operation, that void has been filled.

The mission of BMI is to audit the media’s coverage of the free enterprise system. It is our goal to bring balance to economic reporting and to promote fair portrayal of the business community in the media. Providing resources for journalists, such as connections to sources who can speak intelligently about the economy, is one way we pursue this end. BMI is the economics division of the Media Research Center, and it is the only organization in the world dedicated to the unique challenge of correcting misconceptions about free enterprise in the media.

Julia Seymour – Assistant Editor/Analyst

Julia A. Seymour is an assistant editor/analyst for the Business & Media Institute. MRC She analyzes media coverage, edits and writes for The Business & Media Institute. She is also responsible for sending out important BMI stories to subscribers of The Balance Sheet, and has written Special Reports including Global Warming Censored, UnCritical Condition, Networks Hide the Decline in Credibility of Climate Change Science and Obama the Tax Cutter.

Seymour has appeared on Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network and the Christian Broadcasting Network and has been an in-studio guest on the G. Gordon Liddy Show. She has also done hundreds of radio interviews on a wide-range of topics with stations in more than 30 states as well as many nationally syndicated programs. Her work has appeared or been mentioned by radio host Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, The Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily, USA Today, CNBC.com, Motley Fool and “Ted, White and Blue” by Ted Nugent. Prior to joining BMI in 2006, she was a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia where she wrote daily articles about bias in lower and higher education and contributed to the book “The Real MLA Stylebook.” She holds a B.S. in Mass Communications: Print Journalism from Liberty University. Seymour lives in Northern Virginia.

Email Julia Seymour: jseymour@mrc.org