This Greenwald Dude Must Be Head of the Confederacy of Dunces

Robert Greenwald, the filmmaker who attacked Fox News in "Outfoxed," is now worried about right-wing bias at CNN. On his website, Greenwald passes along a statement from MoveOn.org's media activist unit, which apparently sent out an e-mail to members protesting an edition of the CNN media program "Reliable Sources" last weekend:

This Sunday, CNN engaged in one of the most troubling trends in political dialogue today -- pitting a right-wing advocate against a journalist who is paid to be neutral and calling it a "balanced" discussion of political issues.
Discussing the president's State of the Union address on CNN's "Reliable Sources" were Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank and Byron York, which CNN described as "of National Review."

What CNN did not say is that the National Review is a right-wing movement magazine and that York is author of the book Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. As could be expected, no progressive perspective was offered on President Bush's biggest speech of the year....

Why would CNN do something so obviously unfair and unbalanced? Either they didn't think about it, which is a huge problem, or this is just the latest example of a news outlet caving to the right-wing's false charge of "liberal bias" in the media -- presuming that any real journalist must inherently be liberal.

MoveOn then went to the transcript of "Reliable Sources" to find an example of right-wing bias:

KURTZ: Excuse me, but what about the substance? I mean, whether it's a well-delivered speech and whether the people are sitting on their hands, this is a time when the president, you know, puts forth his agenda for the next year.

MILBANK: People are, you know, crunching through the substance. We get the text of it just beforehand. People are looking through that. But again, a lot of this is logistics. Certainly in the newspaper business. The speech is done at 10:00. Thirty minutes later you've got to have a complete story in the paper that says everything about the speech.

YORK: Well, look, there was substance in the speech. The part about alternative energy was interesting because it came from President Bush, who in the past, when he talked about oil, had been talking about how to get more oil, how to refine more oil. There wasn't, I think, enough attention to that.

And there you have it. "Can you contact CNN today?" MoveOn concludes. "Let them know it is wrong for 'Reliable Sources' to have a right-wing writer like Byron York debating a neutral journalist like Dana Milbank and calling that 'balanced.'"

"Neutral journalist like Dana Milbank"? Just let that sink in for a minute.