WASHINGTON -- Well, I have just lost an argument with Brent
Bozell, head of that indispensable media monitor, the Media
Research Center. MRC has for many years reviewed the daily media
for liberal bias -- an onerous task that. Some of his young
staffers after a week of taking in the blah from the networks, the
major daily newspapers, and the newsmagazines are in danger of
having suffered irreparable damage to their health. The eyes become
bloodshot, the ears ring. The unfortunate young monitors develop
that blank look that one sees on the faces of TV anchors,
especially on cable news, after a day of reading the same news
stories over and over. Through their brains the stories keep
running on an endless audio feed: "In Baghdad today a bomb went
off....The fires in the California foothills today
threatened....And now that story about a cat in Cape Girardeau,
Missouri that has been found living happily at the bottom of a
pond."
The poor souls have these stories running interminably through
their embattled cocos. At MRC they suffer from monitoring the
liberal bilge. At CNN they suffer from iterating the bilge...and
apparently believing it. At any rate, Bozell runs the whole
operation, trying all the time to keep us aware of the extent of
the liberal bias, a bias that is so thick that it is ceaselessly in
danger of presenting as fact utter fantasy and occasionally utter
hysteria, for instance, the hysteria over the NSA, eavesdropping on
"American citizens," who incidentally might be plotting terror with
Islamofascists to blow up another choice piece of American real
estate.
Bozell, lifting a figure of speech from H.L. Mencken, believes
that the epitome of smugness is the smugness of an "archbishop" --
Mencken's term. I, being a devotee of America's art museums,
believe that for smugness one can do no better than point to art
curators. Listen to them purr of their achievements. Listen to the
august tone they assume in pronouncing on a picture, a painter,
Joseph R. McCarthy, Ronald W. Reagan, the glorious breakthrough
Chris Ofili has made in his use of elephant manure on canvass. They
are at their most insufferable when they are crooning on about
their need for more government subsidies from the philistines on
Capitol Hill or about "censorship in the arts." For my money, they
really are a perfect replacement for Mencken's snooty bishops now
that religion has been adjourned from the public square,
notwithstanding the apprehensions of our worry-wart atheists.
Yet Bozell has found some snotty bishops who probably outdo any
of Mencken's bishops (circa 1920) or any contemporary art curator,
the American Roman Catholic bishops. From their battlements at the
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops they have been wagging
a pettifoggers' war with MRC over a nonsense at the cost of
hundreds of thousands of dollars to both and for nothing. MRC has a
news service on the Internet, Cybercast News Service. It uses the
name CNSNEWS.com and has been since 1998. Two years after it
started, the bishops through their lawyers ordered MRC to cease and
desist from using CNS in its name because the bishops' Catholic
News Service had earlier used the letters.
MRC refused, noting that several other news organizations used
the same letters, for instance, a Protestant group, Charisma News
Service, the Cox News Service, the China News Service. Pick on them
was Bozell's implicit challenge. Also Bozell discovered that the
Catholic News Service never had the letters trademarked and
believes they probably could not because of all the other
organizations using these three letters. MRC proceeded to acquire
its own trademark, "Cybercast News Service-CNSNews.com," along with
a distinctive logo to distinguish itself from all the others. That
did it. The bishops' lawyers commenced a legal battle that has run
up until this very month. So far, Bozell has beaten them twice.
They tried to get revoked the CNSNEWS.com trademark. That case was
subsequently dismissed. The bishops then sued in federal court.
That suit has also been thrown out. What next?
The bishops have not sued the Chinese or Cox, only MRC. Some
around MRC think this is politics. Petty bureaucrats in the
Conference of Catholic Bishops do not approve of Bozell's politics
so they are going to harass him. I say it is just another example
of the smugness of a group of men who have demonstrated colossal
smugness for years. Their reluctance to respond when told for
decades that there were priests in their parishes abusing young
people is the most infamous example of the bishops' insularity.
This stupid legal battle with MRC is another example, a pettier
example.
All I know for sure is that MRC's media monitors continue to
ferret out the bias, and the bishops continue to complain that they
are sorely pressed to pay off their sexual abuse penalties. One way
out might be for the bishops to end their nuisance lawsuits and
apply the savings to more pressing problems. It is fortunate for
both MRC and the bishops that the owners of the China News Service
have yet to get into the act.
topics:
Trade, Religion, Islam, Law
