Media Research Center OR Republican Propaganda Central?

[ck4829]

The Media Research Center, historically, has been less about media research and more about advancing Republican talking points. Events of the past couple weeks make that clearer than ever.

When Republican Sen. Rick Santorum proclaimed that decayed, degraded chemical munitions found in Iraq -- as much as 20 years old, dating back to the Iran-Iraq war -- were "weapons of mass destruction," the MRC quickly echoed his claim, burying or ignoring completely the inconvenient fact that the munitions were old, degraded, not a current WMD threat, and were never aimed at the United States -- not to mention that the existence of these munitions was already noted in a 2004 report by the Iraq Survey Group, which was tasked with finding WMDs in Iraq (aka the Duelfer report), a fact confirmed by a Defense Department official -- and attacked anyone who did point that out.

A June 22 NewsBusters post by Brent Baker (repeated in a June 23 CyberAlert) claimed when Keith Olbermann pointed out that particular fact, he did so "condescendingly." Baker took the technicality approach that the find proves liberals wrong, however useless those weapons are: "Though these are not the weapons the Bush administration used to justify going to war, since they date from before the 1991 Gulf War, they do undermine the claims of those on the left -- too often repeated by members of the media -- that 'no' WMD existed in Iraq." That justification was repeated in Tim Graham in his own NewsBusters post. In yet another NewsBusters post complaining about news outlets who didn't report "coalition troops finding lost WMD in Iraq," NewsBusters' Dave Pierre didn't mention the degraded state of the munitions at all.

A June 23 MRC press release bashed "top media that have downplayed or dismissed the findings," insisting that while they are "older weapons ... they do nonetheless constitute WMD." Again, the MRC failed to acknowledge the simple fact of the degraded state of the munitions beyond noting that some "top media" did so. In his June 27 column, MRC president Brent Bozell claimed that the alleged "weapons of mass destruction" "should be a crucial, corrective turning point to the stuck-in-2003, pre-war obsessives." But he, like the rest of his MRC brethren, failed to acknowledge the degraded state of the munitions.

More at:
http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2006/mrcbush.html

[rusty charly]

1. Republican Propaganda Central

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