MRC Watch Dept. - Series Intro: The excruciatingly narrow spectrum of opinion allowed in major media is a fundamentally conservative bias, but one the writers of the Media Research Center will certainly never acknowledge. Rather than trying to democratize media, they seek to even further constrict that spectrum. To deter democracy. A lot of the articles churned out by the MRC are merely devoted to scandalizing the fact that anyone who holds views with which the MRC disagrees is even allowed to offer such views in any media outlet.
Tim Graham, who is the Executive Editor of Newsbusters, the Director of Media Analysis for the Media Research Center and MRC chief Brent Bozell's ghostwriter, has just offered up another example of this. He devoted his Saturday article to complaining that when the New York Times' gang celebrated forthcoming film festivals, "they were especially happy with left-wing films about 'social justice.'" Actually, it was only one Times writer, Mekado Murphy, the Times senior movies editor -- Graham makes it a "they" in an effort to indict the rest.
Graham further falsely claims "they highlighted the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, sponsored by the left-wing lobby of the same name." In reality, the HRW festival was only one of nine festivals covered by the article; it isn't listed first, no special attention is given to it and, in fact, fewer words are devoted to it than to any of the others. The article is simply a rundown of upcoming film festivals, and the HRW festival is one of them.
Graham doesn't have any substantive complaint. His gripe is merely that items that sound to him as if they may have some left point of view are being mentioned as potentially good movies instead of being ignored.
--j.
The previous entry in this series: Deterring Democracy.
[This article was written for MRC Watch, a blog that advocates a vibrant media democracy and frowns on the efforts of the Media Research Center to constrict it even further.]
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