MSNBC is not limited to televised displays of liberal bias. On the economics page of MSNBC.com, reporter Ned Resnikoff published an article earlier today entitled “Gap between minimum wage and tipped wage hits record high.” The All In with Chris Hayes contributor cited a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) claiming that tipped workers make a “significantly lower than the overall median wage” and “experience poverty at much higher rates than the overall workforce.”
Of course, Resnikoff forgot to mention that the EPI “receives much of its funding from organized labor.” That fact was added later in a “clarification” note under the original article.
Resnikoff, whose MSNBC bio describes himself as a reporter “focusing on class, inequality, labor, and occasionally civil liberties” in his bio, clearly had to be admonished after-the-fact that writing an article that pits “restaurant industry groups like the National Restaurant Association (NRA)” who “argue that the average tipped worker makes a decent living” against the EPI, without identifying that it receives 26% of its funding from labor unions, was thoroughly dishonest.
The MSNBC reporter did, however, go out of his way to point out that “the Employment Policies Institute” which “took out an ad in the Washington Post suggesting that a proposed hike in the tipped wage will dramatically reduce employment in the restaurant industry” is a “conservative lobbying group.”
Apparently for MSNBC reporters, research is nonpartisan until proven conservative.
Among other publications for which Resnikoff has written is Jacobin, a magazine which prides itself on being "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture." On its "about us" page, Jacobin includes the ringing endorsement of Resnikoff's boss, Chris Hayes, who hails how the magazine is "very explicitly on the radical left, and sort of hostile to liberal accommodationism."
