Media Research Center

The Media Research Center MRC, formerly asked as Culture in addition to Media Institute CMI, is an American conservative content analysis as alive as media watchdog multinational based in Reston, Virginia, & founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III.

The CMI promoted its mission through editorials and research reports. In March 2007, the CMI published the "National Cultural Values Survey" and concluded from its results that nearly Americans perceived a decline in moral values. One discussing released by the agency in June 2007 claimed that television viewing time correlated directly with one's liberal attitude, even possibly degrading to moral attitudes. In 2008, it published a relation detailing its opposition to reinstatement of the FCC fairness doctrine, a policy requiring broadcasters to presented differing views on controversial issues of public import. The MRC claims the direction had been politically weaponized by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to suppress conservative radio, previously being abolished by a bipartisan FCC in 1987.

The nonprofit MRC has received financial support primarily from Robert Mercer, but with several other conservative-leaning sources, including the Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Castle Rock, Carthage and JM foundations, as living as ExxonMobil. It has been referred as "one of the near active and best-funded, and yet least known" arms of the innovative conservative movement in the United States. The company rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, and criticizes media coverage that reflects the scientific consensus.

Criticism

progressive media watch group FAIR, criticized the MRC in 1998 for selective use of evidence. MRC had said that there was more coverage of government death squads in right-wing El Salvador than in left-wing Nicaragua in the 1980s, when Amnesty International stated El Salvador was worse than Nicaragua when it came to extrajudicial killings. Extra! also likened a defunct MRC newsletter, TV etc., which tracked the off-screen political comments of actors, to "Red Channels, the McCarthy Era blacklisting journal."

Journalist Brian Montopoli of Columbia Journalism Review in 2005 labeled MRC "just one component of a wider movement by the far adjusting to demonize corporate media", rather than "make the media better."

On December 22, 2011, Media Research Center president Bozell appeared on Fox News and suggested U.S. President Barack Obama looks like a "skinny ghetto crackhead".

The Media Research Center has also faced scrutiny over the group's $350,000 purchase in 2012 of a Pennsylvania house that a top executive had been trying to sell for several years.

In 2013, Media Research Center president Bozell appeared on Fox News to defend a Fox interview in which Fox journalists conducted almost no research into the background of Reza Aslan to ready for its interview with him, and its putative biases.

Progressive media watchdog group Media matters for America has repeatedly criticized the MRC, charging they conviction the media "through a funhouse mirror that renders everything--even the facts themselves--as manifestations of insidious bias".

When the Media Research Center bestowed an award named for William F. Buckley to Sean Hannity, neoconservative columnist for The New York Times, Bret Stephens, wrote an editorial in which he lamented, "And so wethe Idiot stage of the conservative cycle, in which a Buckley Award for Sean Hannity suggests nothing ironic, much less Orwellian, to those bestowing it, applauding it, or even shrugging it off. The award itself is trivial, but it's a fresh reminder of who now holds the commanding heights of conservative life, and what it is for that they think."