THAT LIBERAL MEDIA….Over at Red State, Pejman Yousefzadeh repeats a familiar conservative complaint: why are conservative sources labeled “conservative” but liberal sources aren’t labeled “liberal”? Responding to a previous post, he says this:
It is telling that the story that prompted [the] post has the Heritage Foundation ? which was labeled “[t]he conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation” ? as the only source backing up the Labor Department’s arguments. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute, which accused the Bush Administration of failing to protect overtime pay, was described as an institute “which studies issues affecting middle- and lower-income workers and receives funding from some labor groups.”
….The Heritage Foundation is “conservative”….but it is noteworthy that CNN didn’t refer to EPI as “the liberal Economic Policy Institute,” isn’t it?
Well now. Perhaps the real secret behind this is that this is how these groups label themselves. Here’s Heritage:
The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institute ? a think tank ? whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies….
That seems clear enough. Here’s EPI:
EPI was established in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers.
So what’s the problem? The reporter just described these groups the way they describe themselves, and then stuck on a gratuitous qualifer about EPI’s funding (something he didn’t do for Heritage, which was rather generous since the appropriate phrase would have been something like “receives funding from a variety of far-right nutcase foundations.”)
It is upon evidence like this that conservatives keep themselves convinced that they are under siege from the media. A peculiar bunch, conservatives….
