Where is the real bias here?

Articles — By forcechange on September 11, 2008 5:00 am

Newsbusters.org, a self-described tracker of “liberal media bias” had a critique this week of “liberal” columnist Tom Friedman’s appearance on Good Morning America.  Newsbusters argued that Friedman’s liberal bias was evidenced by, among other things, his failure to note, while criticizing McCain for missing all 8 votes on extending the wind and solar tax credit, that Obama had also missed the most recent vote on the measure.

However, the problem is that the evidence Newsbusters used to illustrate Friedman’s supposed bias was a post by us that had looked at a Friedman op-ed where he thoroughly criticizes McCain for missing these votes, but also raises the point that Obama missed the most recent vote.  So it seems Newsbusters is using an op-ed where Friedman calls out Obama for missing this recent vote as proof that Friedman is liberally biased for not calling out Obama for missing this recent vote.  Weird, huh?

That is only half the story. 

Newsbusters is owned by MRC.org, which regularly puts out a “CyberAlert” which has been “tracking liberal media bias since 1996.”  In a recent alert, MRC discusses the above mentioned Newsbusters post, and reiterates the point that Friedman didn’t mention Obama missing the recent vote, again using the ForceChange post about the Friedman op-ed where he calls out Obama for missing the vote, as a source.  But this time, we are cited as “the liberal environmental blog Force Change.” 

So now MRC has not only used Friedman’s own statements about Obama missing the vote as proof that Friedman is biased for not mentioning Obama missing the vote, but has also apparently decided that we are a “liberal” blog.  (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

Anyone who has made an effort to look at our site knows that we criticize “liberals” and “conservatives” alike.  In fact, a simple review of the “Most Viewed Posts” list on the right side of our site (as of today) shows that two of our top five posts have to do with defending and praising the politically conservative T. Boone Pickens.

With that said, we really don’t care if we’re called “liberal” or “conservative.”  There are probably people on both sides of the spectrum who already believe we are one or the other.  But for an organization that claims it is “America’s media watchdog” and uses “sound scientific research” to show “that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values,” we would hope for a little more objectivity. 

We really don’t know a lot about the MRC and hope this was just a single case of lazy analysis (which everyone can be guilty of at times), rather than a knee jerk reaction to tag anyone who is critical of a policy they oppose, with a pejorative “liberal.”  The latter would be a sad indicator of the state of their political discourse.