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Media Research Center

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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, 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])

Contents

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]

Campaign against the "Liberal Media"

In January 2012 MRC founder Brent Bozell announced that the MRC is going to invest $3-$5 million in a campaign to attack the mainstream media. Bozell claimed that the goal is to defeat the "onslaught of character assassination against anyone who dares to challenge Obama." The campaign was allegedly inspired by Gingrich's forceful rebuke of moderator John King in the South Carolina Republican Presidential Debate. [5]

Defense of ALEC

Following the publication of a Bloomberg Businessweek article examining and criticizing the American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC), MRC immediately came to ALEC's defense. MRC's Iris Somberg accused the authors of the article of accepting "the liberal mantra that corporations are evil and buy support through shadowy groups" and asserted that the article "is thick with one-sided caricatures of conservative policies could have easily been written by a left-wing blogger." [6]

But the MRC piece itself is almost a caricature of the Businessweek article. It alleges that Businessweek authors Brendan Greeley and Alison Fitzgerald find ALEC sinister because it is a "non-profit that promotes limited government, free markets, and federalism." But it ignores the authors' pointed critiques that show ALEC is less about limited government and free markets and more about using government to benefit ALEC's corporate members. For example, the Business week article discusses how the Republican mayor of Lafayette, Louisiana had plans to provide high-speed internet to his rural constituents, but was thwarted by a lobbyist pushing a corporate-sponsored ALEC bill through the Louisiana legislature that would block local government efforts to expand broadband. The Businessweek article points out the bill "was not designed to level the playing field," but to protect entrenched telecommunications interests at the expense of the public interest.

But rather than criticizing the Businessweek article on the merits, or countering the claims that its author's make, MRC's Somberg sets up a convoluted ad hominem. Somberg writes that groups cited in the article had received funding from the Open Society Foundations of George Soros, but does not actually dispute any thing those groups say. (One of the groups Somberg criticizes is the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes ALECexposed.org as well as Sourcewatch.org. CMD's Open Society grant is not used for its ALEC project, and instead goes towards the national security and surveillance research of CMD's Executive Director, Lisa Graves, who has testified before Congress on such issues.)

The MRC article condescendingly states that the Businessweek authors say that ALEC receives funding from Exxon Mobil ("Nothing says evil like Big Oil cash," Somberg writes), perhaps to set up some sort of false equivalency with other groups indirectly receiving Soros money. But Exxon Mobil is only one of many corporations mentioned in the Businessweek article that fund ALEC. MRC does not mention that ALEC is led by lobbyists, and gets 98% of its funding from corporate interests. The problem with ALEC's corporate funding is not just with the funding per se, but with the fact that those dollars are being used to influence elected officials, and to push laws that govern the lives of all Americans designed to benefit the corporate bottom line. That is hardly comparable to a philanthropist helping fund online investigative journalism organizations.

The original Businessweek article can be found Here

ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Learn more at ALECexposed.org.

Key personnel

Subsidiaries

Funding

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, 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
http://www.mediaresearch.org/

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

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. ↑ Right Launches Giant Campaign Against Media, Buzzfeed, January 26, 2011
  6. ↑ Iris Somberg, Soros Cash, Left-Wing Talking Points Fuel ALEC attack, Media Research Center Network, December 6, 2011
  7. ↑ "Factsheet: Media Research Center", ExxonSecrets website, accessed October 2009.
  8. ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Accessed December 6, 2011.

External resources

External articles

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