MRC president Brent Bozell repeated his criticism of the media's rush to judgment in Ferguson on Fox's The Kelly File on Friday night. (His column appeared in Investor's Business Daily on Friday as well.)
Bozell has been out front urging the media to show restraint and dwell on the facts instead of getting emotional and deciding what the facts are going to be. He called the coverage so far a "travesty" in its lurch to leftist assumptions (Video, transcript below):
MacCALLUM: You know, so much of what we see in this assumes that this case is done, that this case is over. And that guilt has been decided on the part of this police officer. And yet the investigation into what happened has really just begun.
BOZELL: Yeah. I think, Martha, I think the coverage has been a travesty. Why? Look at it first from the standpoint of quantity. How did this incident justify hundreds if not thousands of nonstop hours of coverage when there is so much going on in the world? Look at the numbers. You've got 100 blacks have been shot by white cops. What happened to the other 99? Why didn't they merit coverage? You had this, Ben Carson has pointed out, you've had 5,000 blacks killed by blacks. Why isn't that news? Four hundred thousand blacks have been murdered in Darfur that's not news. But this is. Now, what's the answer that they give? It's because there's public outrage to it. OK.
There's public outrage from people on the streets, how about this? How about every January you have 50, 60, 70, 100,000 marchers protesting the murder of the unborn in Washington. Where are the cameras on them? And if you have cameras on them, every single day, guess what? Those marchers will come back day after day after day. This is a media created -- not created, but this is an explosion created by the media. They then turn around and cover the explosion they created.
MacCALLUM: Yeah. I spoke with the mother of an 18-year-old boy who -- a white boy as it happens that was murdered by three young black men in New Jersey. And her family has been grieving ever since. It was a senseless crime. He was gunned down 20 times in his car. And nobody knows his story. And I hear what you're saying.
BOZELL: That every day in Chicago or Detroit. There are terrible stories taking place.
Bozell said that in a story with this much uncertainty and outrage, “This is where the media more than ever need to be disinterested, neutral observers. They're participating in race-based -- race-baiting politics. Their participatory in this. The Al Sharptons of the world are feeding this. And this is why I'm saying there's a travesty.”
