Fox News’s Brit Hume Warns That Because Of Blogs, Future News Will Be ‘More Partisan’
Last night, the conservative Media Research Center, which houses the ever on point NewsBusters blog, hosted its annual “DisHonors” media awards gala in Washington, D.C. Aside from the cornier “Media Messiah” and “Obamagasm” media honors the group bestowed to alleged “liberal” members of the press, MRC presented Fox News’s Brit Hume with its “William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence.” In his acceptance speech, Hume warned of the dangers of the rise of blogs and news being “presented from one political viewpoint”:
HUME: What are we getting?…We’re getting bloggers and websites and all sorts of individual entrepreneurs, and we have a vaster menu of choices today than we’ve ever had. But I think that we also have the danger that everything will be presented from one political viewpoint or the other, and that the media that confront us are going to be more partisan than ever — which means that the Media Research Center will have a mission for many years to come, and a good thing that is.
Hume’s warning is rather odd because in the very same speech, he thanked the MRC — an unabashedly conservative outfit — for feeding him information for his reports as anchor of Fox News’s Special Report:
HUME: I want to say a word, however, of thanks, to
Brent and to the team at the Media Research Center and all the contributors who make that work there possible. <…> also for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report. I don’t know what we would have done without them. It was a daily, sort of a buffet of material to work from, and we — we — we certainly made tremendous use of it.
But if anyone would know anything about reporting from a certain political point of view, it is Brit Hume. During this past presidential campaign, Hume (perhaps unknowingly) took part in the right wing campaign to paint Barack Obama as a Muslim — first suggesting that Obama had previously practiced Islam and later falsely claiming that Obama’s brother “is not sure sure” Barack is Christian.
Moreoever, Hume has claimed that al-Qaeda in Iraq “was there before we got there,” that “the problem” with the Walter Reed affair was that it looked bad for former President Bush, and that Democrats “are kind of embarrassed by patriotism.” He recently said Bush put American on an “amazing” foreign policy path. And over the years, Hume’s reports have routinely contained conservative misinformation, especially on global warming and the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal.
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http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/20/hume-warns-media-mrc/