Associated Press reporter David Bauder wrote an article on the emergence of "pundit police" in the wake of MSNBC suspending reporter David Shuster for two weeks over his pimped-out-Chelsea outburst. Bauder began by noting how NewsBusters (Mark Finkelstein) was on Shuster's case within ten minutes:
Fewer than a half-million people were watching MSNBC when David Shuster made his comment that Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign had "pimped out" daughter Chelsea by having her make political phone calls.
Among them were monitors at Newsbusters. The Web site posted video of Shuster 10 minutes after the show was over, beginning a reaction that led to his two-week suspension. The pundit police never go off duty.
Say something stupid, offensive or incorrect on television and you're going to hear about it — fast.
Bauder identified two police chiefs in the Media Research Center and Media Matters for America:
Two pundit police chiefs are Media Matters, from the left, and the Media Research Center, from the right. The MRC operates Newsbusters.
Media Matters was founded in 2004 by David Brock, the former conservative who switched allegiances. Its goal is to watch conservative media figures and hang them by their words, publicizing their statements to the wider world and challenging them on facts.
"You certainly know you're having an impact on conservative media when you become part of the conspiracy theories of every right-wing pundit in the country," said spokesman Karl Frisch. "That's sort of a badge of honor."
Fox's Bill O'Reilly is a frequent target; he calls Media Matters "an assassination Web site."
L. Brent Bozell, nephew of conservative icon William F. Buckley, started the Media Research Center in 1987 with the goal of becoming the conservative movement's ombudsman. It tries to sniff out signs of liberal bias and takes the media to task for gaffes, the same standards journalists hold for reporters, said Tim Graham, the center's director of media analysis.
"We have a rather mundane goal here, which is to get eyeballs," Graham said. "We all like making a splash. We all like getting the Drudge link."
Pundits feel the eyeballs.
"In a campaign capacity, I've been known to have foot-in-mouth disease," said Donna Brazile, a manager of Al Gore's 2000 campaign and a CNN commentator. "But as a pundit, I'm much more guarded. If I say something nice about George Bush, I could get kicked around for months."
When I talked briefly to Bauder, I rejected the tag of "pundit police," which at least to me makes media critics sound like bullies looking to ruin journalistic careers. As he does imply, I said much of what MRC and NewsBusters does is perform the same accountability function for the media that they claim to apply to everyone else. We pull out their gaffes, factual mistakes, vicious hit jobs and delirious puff pieces and publicize them. On the other hand, it was nice to be recognized as a positive/negative force in the media. Bauder added that partisanship can hurt our persuasiveness:
Partisanship gives these pundit police their bite and vigor, yet sometimes undermines their arguments. Media Matters called O'Reilly "ignorant" last fall when he commented about noticing little difference between the black-run Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem and restaurants owned by whites — while giving him little credit for dining there with Al Sharpton.
Similarly, Bozell criticized CBS News for identifying "conservative" Republicans 44 times during Super Tuesday coverage while not labeling any Democrats as liberal. However, he neglected to note the chief reason for the disparity, that doubt among GOP voters about John McCain's conservative credentials was one of the night's biggest issues.
While it's true that our four-paragraph MRC press release with the numbers and Bozell's quotes did not address the McCain-vs-conservatives narrative, NewsBusters certainly did. Brent Baker unveiled the label count this way:
Opposition to John McCain from conservatives is clearly a proper topic of news analysis on an election night, but during its two hours of EST/CST prime time coverage of Super Tuesday, the CBS News team managed to apply the “conservative” label at least 44 times -- in several instances beyond anything about the conservative split with McCain -- yet never once uttered the term “liberal” during a night when two liberals faced off on the Democratic side.
