Brent Bozell, Eric Heyl, and The Tribune-Review

You may have missed this from Jim Romenesko this past week:

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. [Emphasis added.]

The Daily Beast has a follow-up:

Employees at the MRC were never under any illusion that Bozell had been writing his own copy. “It’s an open secret at the office that Graham writes Bozell’s columns, and has done so for years,” said one former employee. In fact, a former MRC employee went so far as to tell The Daily Beast: “I know for a fact that Bozell didn’t even read any of the drafts of his latest book until after it had been sent to the publishers.”

The Graham-Bozell relationship can best displayed in this book talk for the book that the two nominally co-authored in 2008, Whitewash. At an event at the National Press Club, Bozell gives an introductory speech but then has Graham come up to take questions.

It's bad enough that the head of the a conservative media watchdog is being charged with, in effect, lying to his readers - all the while screaming for the rest of the media to "TELL THE TRUTH" but there's more to this.

It's here in Romenesko's story.  A defense of Bozell was given to Romenesko when his third MRC confirmation:

...defended the practice of “people signing off on agreeable words written for them.” He asked me: “How many speeches has Obama written the last ten years? Should he have prefaced the State of the Union with ‘My fellow Americans – I didn’t write this?’

Here's the interesting part.  It's the next two paragraphs:

I asked Pittsburgh Tribune-Review colunnist and National Society of Newspaper Columnists president Eric Heyl about this remark. He said:

“The argument that the columnist should be allowed to use a ghostwriter because the president has speechwriters is as limp as pasta left overnight in boiling water. The comparison is ludicrous. The columnist doesn’t have to spend much of his time dealing with a dysfunctional Congress or fretting over Iran’s nuclear program.”

See that?  Trib columnist Eric Heyl is quoted rejecting that defense of Bozell's ghostwriter.  I wonder if Romenesko knows that Bozell has had some columns published in the very same paper that Eric Heyl writes for?

That would be the Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Revue, (as if you didn't already know where I am taking this) and that's where Brent Bozell had a (ghostwritten, it seems) column published as recently as this past Christmas Eve.

I wonder of Romenesko knows that?  I also wonder if he knows that Richard Mellon Scaife, by way of the foundations he controls, has given $3.7 million to Bozell's Media Research Center or how that's a little more than a fifth of the MRC's total foundation support.

So why is this such a big deal?  For that I'll turn to a former National Society of Newspaper Columnists president, P-G columnist Samantha Bennett.  to be clear, she's no longer an NSNC officer and she's not speaking for the NSNC.  This is her own opinion:

I didn't know about the ghostwriter allegation; I don't read Bozell. Or his ghostwriter. I don't know whether it's true or not. But I do believe it's a serious breach of ethics for any columnist of any stripe to put his name on stuff he didn't write. If you wrote it, own it. If you are a celebrity or "face" of a cause, write your own damn diatribes/marketing/agitprop/whatever or give credit to the person who does. Everybody knows corporate CEOs and presidents have speechwriters, but Mike Royko, Maureen Dowd, Dave Barry, Ernie Pyle, Erma Bombeck, Ellen Goodman and all other professional columnists string their own words and ideas together or suffer terrible consequences. You get drummed out of the corps for violating that code. And rightly so. Readers trust you. You can't lie to them.

It looks like Brent Bozell was lying to his readers on the pages of Scaife's Tribune-Review after his Media Research Center received $300,000 from the Scaife-controlled Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2011.

Any comments, Mr Heyl?

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due. Again.

Don't normally agree with the Trib's Eric Heyl, but he's 100%, absolutely, totally and without any sort of snarky bloggery sarcasm, completely correct with this column.

Here, I'll let Eric frame the argument:

There's due process, then there's overdue process.

Chuck McCullough's criminal case long ago turned into a protracted process whose resolution is ridiculously overdue.

And:

McCullough, 58, an Upper St. Clair attorney, is accused of bilking an elderly client, the late Shirley Jordan, out of more than $200,000. He was arrested in February 2009. That was 56 months ago.[Emphasis added.]

If I may point out something, if you google "Chuck McCullough arrested" you will get, on top of google's search list, this blog post - the date was February 9, 2009.

That was only 20 days after the President Obama's first inauguration.  Think of that for a second.  The Kenyan Socialist President's time in the White House exceeds McCullough's post-arrest-pre-trial time by a skosh under three weeks.  Think of all that's happened in that administration in those 56 weeks.

• American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (February 17, 2009)
• Cash for Clunkers (August 6, 2009)
• The Nobel Peace Prize (October 9, 2009)
• The Affordable Health Care Act (March 23, 2010)
• Don't Ask Don't Tell Repeal Act (December 22, 2010)

And so on.

What movies were were released after Chuck McCullough was arrested?

• Avatar (Premiered December, 2009)
• Both Star Trek films (April, 2009 and April, 2013)

So you remember seeing Avatar in the theatre?  However long ago you think that was, Chuck McCullough was arrested before that happened.

And so on.

Eric ends with:

If he hasn't succumbed to old age by the time the trial begins, McCullough might be sorely inconvenienced attempting to attend the proceedings. It wouldn't be the relatively quick commute from his home in Alpha Centauri that would prove irksome.

I'm glad Eric brought this up.  Did you know that Alpha Cenari is 4.37 light years away?  That's about 53 months.

So if they had sensitive enough equipment and if that sensitive enough equipment is pointed our way and if they could understand Pittsburghese, the residents on whatever planets that may be circling around Alpha Centauri are just hearing the news about Chuck McCullough's arrest.

Think about that.

It's Been A While, My Friends...

I haven't done one of these sorts of posts in a while but here goes.

This weekend the Tribune-Review published an interview with columnist Eric Heyl.  It begins like this:

Carl Meacham is director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. He spoke to the Trib about what Cuban President Raul Castro's recently announced plan to step down when his term ends in 2018 means to Cuba and the United States.

We have to wonder about the "non-partisan" nature of this foreign policy think tank when, according to The Bridge Project a majority of its foundational support came from one source (well three Scaife controlled sources; the Allegheny, Sarah Scaife, and Carthage Foundations)

According to that website between 1985 and 2011, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, received a total of $19,786, 480 dollars (unadjusted for inflation) from about a dozen foundations.  Of that total, about 54% or about $10,743,000 came from those Scaife Foundations ($400k from Allegheny, $10.15 million from Sarah Scaife and $195K from Carthage).

And yet, Eric Heyl, columnist employed by uber-conservative Richard Mellon Scaife at the Scaife owned Tribune-Review didn't see fit to tell you of his boss's financial entanglements with the "non-partisan" think tank.

The Right Wing noise machine noises on...

A Warm Tribune-Review Sendoff

Where Eric Heyl offers a nice moist towel (metaphorical, of course) to Ed Feulner, Trib columnist and current President of the Heritage Foundation.

For those not familiar with this story, here's some background.  Earlier this month the Tribune-Review reported that South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint would be resigning from the Senate to replace Feulner as President of the Heritage Foundation.  According to this piece from Newsmax, this makes for one big happy:

Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner is enthusiastically welcoming the appointment of South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint as his replacement.

In announcing that DeMint will step down from the Senate on Dec. 31 to take over the running of the foundation, Feulner issued the following statement.

“Three years ago, I told the Heritage Foundation's Board of Trustees that I would step down as president in April of 2013. I urged them to set up a formal succession process and begin a national search.

“During their nationwide search, the Board looked for a successor who would keep Heritage on its course of growth and innovation, and preserve our widely acknowledged status as an institutional center of the conservative movement. And the Board has found a splendid successor.

“I'm delighted to announce that the Board has elected Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina to take over next April as President of The Heritage Foundation.

Do I need to add that Tribune-Review owner Richard Mellon Scaife is the Vice-President of the Board of Trustees for Heritage and also owns 40% of Newsmax?

Nice tight little web of journalismness there, huh?  All those connections to Scaife.  No mention of them in Scaife's paper...

Anyway, I wanted to point out a few things.  I think we can gather where Heyl did his research for his first question:

Q: You shepherded The Heritage Foundation from a nine-member outfit to an organization that employees 275-plus and occupies three Washington, D.C., buildings. Were you confident setting out that you could grow the foundation into what The New York Times once called “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis”?

If you go to Ed Feulner's bio at Heritage, you'll see these two paragraphs at the top:

Edwin J. Feulner’s leadership as President of The Heritage Foundation has transformed the think tank from a small policy shop into America’s powerhouse of conservative ideas and what the New York Times calls “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.”

Under Feulner, Heritage’s presence in Washington grew from a nine-member staff working out of a rented office on Capitol Hill in 1977 to a 275-person organization occupying three office buildings near the U.S. Capitol today.

Eric, that's some great in-depth research, my friend!  Must've taken you all of 6 seconds to find.  In touting Heritage, Feulner points out how it became such a powerhouse; credibility, marketing and timeliness.

On its credibility, he responds with this on pointing out some of Heritage's significant achievements:

It‘s been 35 years so I could go through a long, long list. But in the ’80s, it has to be when Ronald Reagan (backed) the anti-missile defense system, or Star Wars, as it was then called, and (the ideas) that tax reform and tax cuts lead to a growing economy.

Hmm...so the great achievements are SDI and Trickle-down Economics - but was any of it true?

Well we have the American Physical Society way back in 1987 already doubting the feasibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative and we all know how well Trickle-down works:

The tax cuts came in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. The administration's plan slashed corporate and individual income tax rates, with the biggest cut in the top rate. The Reagan team promised that their tax cuts would jolt the economy back to life because, as the Wall Street Journal's editors put it, "high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive." And the true believers went so far as to suggest that the economy would grow fast enough that tax revenues would actually rise, making the tax cuts painless.

The results never came close to measuring up to the supply-side rhetoric. For starters, the tax cuts busted the federal budget. The federal deficit ballooned from 2.7% of GDP in 1980 to 6% of GDP in 1983, the largest peacetime deficit in history, and was still 5% of GDP in 1986. Tax revenues did pick up, especially after the 1983 payroll tax increase kicked in, reducing the deficit somewhat. Still, tax revenues grew far more slowly over than the 1980s business cycle (2.5% from 1979 to 1989) than they did in the 1990s business cycle (4.1% from 1989 to 2000).

Yea, great achievements, there Ed.

One bit of early Heritage history not brought up much these days (and a h/t to an astute reader for bringing this to my attention): Roger Pearson.  From the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism at Ferris State University:

Fascist ideologist Roger Pearson, a Pioneer Fund beneficiary ($568,000 from 1981-1991) and author of Eugenics and Race, published by Willis Carto's notoriously anti-Semitic Noontide Press, argues that the white race is endangered by inferior genetic stock, but with proper use of modern biological technology "a new super-generation" descended from "only the fittest" of the previous generation can be produced. The first nation to adopt such a scientific breeding program, Pearson contends, "would dominate the rest of the world."

In 1965 Pearson became editor of Western Destiny, a magazine established by Carto and dedicated to spreading fascist ideology. Using the pseudonym [link to deposition] of Stephan Langton, Pearson then became the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966-67 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question," which included articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power," and "Swindlers of the Crematoria."

Despite Pearson's long history of association with neo-Nazi groups, he was appointed in 1977 to the original board of editors of Policy Review, a journal published by the respected Heritage Foundation, a conservative political research organization in Washington, D.C. [Emphasis added.]

After an expose in the Washington Post in May, 1977, Pearson was asked to leave Heritage.  Feulner became President of Heritage in 1977 - would've been nice to see a comment on how/why Heritage fired the   fascist (maybe even why they hired him in the first place), huh?

More Climate Blah-Blah

Yesterday, Mediamatters named Marc Morano the Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year saying among other things that:

These days Morano is paid by an industry-funded group to run the climate denial website ClimateDepot.com. At Climate Depot, Morano serves as the de facto research department for the right-wing media's attacks on climate science, and mobilizes his readers to target individual scientists and reporters for telling the public about climate change threats. The site was instrumental in manufacturing the 2009 "Climategate" controversy, which Morano incorrectly claimed exposed "deliberate manipulation of facts and data" by climate scientists. Morano is a darling of the organization most committed to climate denial, the Heartland Institute.

The "industry-funded" group mentioned above is called the "Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow" (CFACT) and Sourcewatch has this oh-so surprising bit of info on CFACT:

Media Transparency calculates that between 1991 and 2006 CFACT gained $1,280,000 from 18 grants from only two foundations -- the Carthage Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

Actually, according to the Bridgeproject.com, those two foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife have given an even $2,000,000 to CFACT between 1996 and 2009 ($2.433 million if you adjust for inflation).

Which made me curious to see if Mr Morano actually made it onto Mr Scaife's pages and whether any mention is made of CFACT's financial connections to the Trib's owner.

Of course he made it into the Trib and of course there's no mention of the money (there never is)

Take a look at this from this past August where Eric Heyl (Hey Eric, how's it going?) tosses out the first softball:

Marc Morano operates Climatedepot.com, an Internet clearinghouse for information on climate, environmental and energy news. Morano, a former aide to U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., spoke to the Trib on the latest developments in the climate-change debate.

Q: It‘s the hottest year on record so far in the Northeast. Must be global warming, right?

A: Globally, it‘s not the hottest. In fact, here is the problem: The heat they are touting as proof of man-made global warming is occurring in the continental United States, which is less than 2 percent of the Earth‘s surface. So far in 2012, (global) temperatures have been slightly below the average for the last 15 years. So if the Earth isn‘t actually in record warmth globally, why are we looking at 2 percent (of its surface) and then trying to draw extrapolations?

Let's stop right there. They're speaking in early August, 2012 so we can safely assume that the data Morano's commenting on is from the previous month.  So let's have a look at the data.  Heyl was probably responding to this (or something like it):

Aug. 6, 2012 — If you live in the Northeast, welcome to the hottest year on record. New data released by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University shows the Northeast's seven-month average (January through July) of 49.9 degrees was the warmest such period since 1895, the year such record keeping began. It was the second warmest such period in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the warmest first seven months of the year in the rest of the Northeast.

But look at what Morano did.  He sidesteps the data by saying that the Continental US is only 2% of the planet's surface and so it's an extrapolation to make any generalizations about the whole from such a small sliver.  Fair enough  but then he says that 2012 is slightly cooler than the average of the past 15 years.

He's what you call "cherry picking" the data.  By limiting his scope to the last decade and a half, he's able to make a more or less useless extrapolation himself.  In fact, according to NOAA:

The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2012 was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F). This is the fourth warmest July since records began in 1880.

Who's cherry picking the data?  Amazing how much anti-science you can buy for $2.4 million, huh?