On August 9, 2005, the Media Research Center launched the NewsBusters blog to bring its longstanding research into the blogosphere. Within a month, we were reporting on Kanye West blurting out "George Bush doesn't care about black people" during an NBC telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief.
NewsBusters has scored some tremendous victories exposing the Left and their media allies. It was NewsBusters, for example, that debunked Hillary Clinton’s 2008 claim to have arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire” in 1996. Using a 12-year video clip pulled from the MRC archives, we showed how Clinton’s arrival was peaceful, as she and daughter Chelsea calmly greeted children. That blog was widely reported and seriously damaged Clinton’s reputation in the midst of the 2008 presidential primaries.
In 2012, NewsBusters caught one of the most esteemed liberal foreign affairs pundits, CNN host Fareed Zakaria, in a plagiarism scandal, for which he was subsequently suspended from CNN and Time magazine. There are many, many more success stories at NewsBusters.
A few weeks later, during the 2012 Republican convention, NewsBusters exposed Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian, caught on an open mic declaring that Mitt Romney and the GOP were “happy to have a party with black people drowning.” After NewsBusters exposed Chalian, Yahoo! News promptly fired him. Naturally, he found a home on CNN.
In 2015, we pushed hard on the outrage that then-NBC evening anchor Brian Williams was caught repeatedly fabricating stories to make his reporting life sound more exciting, and NBC suspended him without pay for six months, and replaced him with Lester Holt.
In 2018, NewsBusters drew attention to The View co-host Joy Behar attacking Vice President Mike Pence as “mentally ill” if he thinks he hears God in prayer. After a nationwide MRC Action campaign contacting ABC sponsors about these offensive remarks, Behar publicly apologized on the show.
We’ve been pleased in the past few months that President Trump has held up our study on "Twitter Moments" and the Mueller investigation, and that White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has cited our research to rebut scandal-pushing reporters.
PS: For some memories of the early years, you can check out MRC videos from the fifth anniversary. On the "Drama."
And some memorable "flubs."
