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]
6 Comments

Saying Fox “leans conservative” is like saying Titanic took on a little water.

I have respect for one Pew. She doesn’t work at Sunoco or for the Foundation.

The Foundation helped steal the Barnes Museum. $6B worth of impressionist art. No one would give him the time of day (not the Pews, Annenbergs, no museum) when he was live. He left the collection to Lincoln University. Public and private interests shit on his will in Orphans court just like they shit on him when he was alive.

Pew Research, Pew Charitable Trust. Annenbergs. Carnegies. All robber barons of the new millennium. The guilt never washes off, and the greed never diminishes.

Oh, and thanks for spelling ruffage for me.

I will now think of the Pew as Big Giant Space Carrots.

@ManchuCandidate: I wasn’t sure what to do about the graphic, and then I entered “sentient vegetables” into Google Images, which, amazingly, delivered. I thought I’d be stuck with VeggieTales.

@nojo:
A cooler pic is James Arness as the Thing From Outer Space (the old school version of “The Thing”) but it most certainly would have not fit with what Pew has done.

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