Weekly Worst from the Media Research Center
The so-called mainstream media never admit their liberal tilt, so the news analysts at the Media Research Center tirelessly document the media's bias and expose their left-wing agenda. The "awards" for last week's lowlights:
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
CBS Smears Kerry Critics
CBS must find it intolerable that a group of Vietnam veterans including some of John Kerry's former commanding officers called the candidate "unfit to be the Commander-in-Chief." So on the May 4 CBS Evening News, reporter Byron Pitts smeared the critics: "If you think this is just a group of concerned veterans, think again."
"It's the same strategy used to go after Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam," Pitts proclaimed, presenting a Democratic myth as fact. Vets opposing Kerry had nothing to do with Cleland's loss in 2002, of course, and the GOP campaign against him focused on Cleland's Senate votes, not Vietnam. Pitts ignored all of these facts, but he did reward Democrats with an anti-GOP soundbite from Cleland himself: "If you don't go to war, don't throw rocks at those who did."
Instead of scrutinizing John Kerry, CBS's Byron Pitts smeared Kerry's critics.
CNN Equates Iraq Abuse to My Lai Massacre
The anti-war media has certainly capitalized on reports of prisoner abuse in Iraq, but a May 4 report on CNN's Inside Politics pushed the "America is awful" line harder than any other network story. Anchor Judy Woodruff began by asking whether Donald Rumsfeld was correct when he branded the abusive acts as "un-American." "But are they?" she wondered.
Reporter Bruce Morton went back to the '60s to show a pattern of American atrocities: "We like to think that we're the good guys. But we're not. Not always." Morton then launched into the story of the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of civilians were killed. But he failed to say that the awful My Lai killings were an aberration in American military history, not at all indicative of the morality of American soldiers.
