Highly Respected DC Institution Overrun by Pod People

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism — so confident of itself that it goes by Journalism.org — dropped this jewel Friday on an unwitting Internet:

Moreover, the [Trayvon] Martin story has been a much bigger story on MSNBC, whose talk show hosts are liberal, and a much smaller story on Fox, whose prime time lineup leans conservative.

Whatever it was that the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism planned on telling us after that, we quickly lost interest. Mainly because of our sudden alarm that the staff of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has been abducted by aliens and replaced with sentient vegetables.

You may think us crazy, but the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism describes itself as a “nonpartisan ‘fact tank’”, which we think you’ll agree is a phrase that would never pass the lips of a terrestrial-born advanced primate.

If you doubt the possibility that a multigenerational spaceship from Andromeda traveled 2,537,553 light years for the sole purpose of abducting the staff of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in order to replace them with self-aware roughage, we challenge you to come up with some other reasonable explanation of how anybody in America — never mind any journalist — could possibly describe Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Greta Van Susteren as “leans conservative”.

And then limit that weak description to Fox’s “prime time lineup”, holding harmless the other twenty-one hours of Fox’s day. While ignoring Joe Starbucks with a blanket statement that MSNBC’s “talk show hosts are liberal”.

Sure, there’s a very slim chance that the staff of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism can’t write a simple boilerplate description without lapsing into error-ridden False Balance. But nothing compared to the high probability that the Alien Invasion has begun with the harvesting of a Nonpartisan Fact Tank. Because really, nothing else makes sense.

How Blogs, Twitter and Mainstream Media Have Handled the Trayvon Martin Case [Journalism.org]