Brent Bozell, the head honcho at MRC, has been on Fox News for years and years deriding a lazy, liberal press that never does its job and always bashes conservatives. He's one of the top rightwing resentment pundits and has made a good living off of it. But they've also done some very sketchy things at the MRC.
A while back, their website was down for a few days and they said they were hacked, but I know from an anonymous source that they changed webmasters and all their data got lost because of it and instead of being honest, they made up a fictitious story to cover up their homemade chaos.
Now we learn from Romenesko that Brent Bozell never wrote any of his own syndicated columns.
The conservative Media Research Center often urges liberal news outlets to TELL THE TRUTH, but the Reston, VA-based press watchdog isn’t telling the truth about its own leader: Brent Bozell doesn’t write the syndicated column that appears under his byline.
It is longtime MRC media analysis director Tim Graham who writes “almost everything published under [Bozell's] name,” a former MRC employee tells me in an email. “That includes his weekly column. Same goes for his books, which at least carry Graham’s name in a secondary billing, but also aren’t written by Bozell (but Bozell keeps 80-90% of the advance and all profits!)”
Two other people with ties to MRC confirmed that Graham is Bozell’s ghostwriter – and that Graham is not happy with the assignment.“Tim just resents having to do it,” says a former employee.
Graham’s wife, too, is so angry about the arrangement that she refuses to attend Media Research Center events.
“She hates Bozell,” I’m told. “The forced ghostwriting is the issue,” says an ex-employee. (Laura Haugan Graham did not respond to an email sent Wednesday via Facebook. I also emailed Bozell and Graham for comment on Wednesday, but did not get responses. I called the Media Research Center offices on Wednesday and left a message that wasn’t returned.)
Oh, my. It looks like someone has a real resentment against Bozo Bozell.
Tom Kludt finds some nice examples of Bozell's many "lazy journalism" columns:
But when it apparently was Graham doing the writing and Bozell taking the credit, the column often lamented purportedly lazy journalism.
In January of 2002, months after 9/11, the column attempted to pinpoint the reason why the country was so unprepared for the attack.
As America grew wealthier and less vigilant, we grew lazy, focusing on petty agendas rather than serious issues. The "we" in that sentence includes our national media. While our military readiness was slipping during the Clinton years, the only defense issues that really attracted the network stars were the social ones: gays in the military, sexual harassment allegations at Tailhook, the adulteries of Kelly Flinn, or the medical mysteries behind "Gulf War Syndrome."
A few years later, when liberal journalist Eric Boehlert provided Nexis results to challenge the argument that Planned Parenthood and abortion advocates are never described as "social liberal," a 2005 Bozell column dismissed the rebuttal.
"That's just lazy, sloppy criticism," the column read.
A 2012 column titled "CBS: Still Lazy With Obama After All These Years" blasted anchor Charlie Rose for his interview with the President.
But journalists weren't the only people who drew charges of laziness.
Weighing in on the debate over girls competing in high school wrestling, a 2011 Bozell columnopened with a groan toward America's youth.
"It's so easy to look at teenagers in general today and sigh," the column read. "They're more than a bit lazy, a bit spoiled and more than a bit morally compromised."
Ha ha, Brent Bozell is the real lazy and dishonest one, who is a bit spoiled and a bit morally compromised. But you already knew that, didn't you?
