Media Matters' Hypocritical War on Bias
The New Black Panther Party voter intimidation story is getting a lot of play in the right-leaning media. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Washington Examiner and others are touting this story as an indictment of the character of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. The liberal media is simply not reporting the story. To understand why not, read what Media Matters has to say on the story.
Media Matters for America is a self-described "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Based on this description, we would expect them to be objective fact-checkers. Yes, they are real human beings with developed political orientations, but they are holding themselves out as arbiters of truth and fiction. So, the characteristics we should look for are objectivity and sound logic. Yet, their coverage of the New Black Panther Party story unmasks them as emotional partisans, incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion.
The first criticism of the news story as relevant news is that whistle-blower is a "longtime GOP activist who was hired to the Bush-era DOJ." The implication is that Adams is a Republican partisan and therefore incapable of being objective. Yet, Media Matters claims to be objective while being open about their own progressive bent. It is possible to make a fair criticism while having a political ideology. If that weren't true, then the very concept of an organization like Media Matters would be an absurdity.
Second, "the Bush-era DOJ that Adams worked for declined to pursue charges against the Minutemen in a 2006 voter intimidation case based on nearly identical circumstances." Whether or not that is so, it is not relevant to the discussion. Either the behavior being discussed is improper or it isn't. Bringing up alleged bad behavior by the Bush administration does nothing to mitigate the guilt of the actors in the current situation.
The third criticism is that this is a bogus story, just like Bill Ayers, Climategate, and ACORN. Well, that is a subjective opinion. I and others believe that the president of our country should not have unseemly associates like Bill Ayers. We believe that climate scientists should be objective in their quest for the truth. We think that our tax money should not support organizations like ACORN after they were caught aiding a fictitious child-prostitution ring. If the folks at Media Matters disagree, that is fine. That is their opinion. I have my opinion, which in itself is not a fact to be debunked.
Intelligent people acting in good faith can come to different conclusions. We should not assume that people who have a different perspective are stupid or deluded. They may know something that we do not and vice versa. Everyone's views are colored by different life experiences, so we may simply think about the same facts differently. Until the folks at Media Matters internalize these truths, they will continue to conflate disagreement with dishonesty and delusion.