We?ll Always Have Dan Rather

RNC chairman Reince Priebus talks to conservative donor Foster Friess after the Media Research Center's gala dinner on Thursday in Washington, DC.

Photo by David Weigel.

The invitation is noncommittal and polite??black tie appreciated.? Most people oblige. Shortly after 6 p.m., the National Building Museum fills up with happy conservatives in their best clothes for the Media Research Center?s gala. The Great Hall, 316 feet long with a 70-foot ceiling, is separated into one early-evening bar, one late-evening bar, and a dining room with 100-odd tables for 1,000 guests.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, grabs a glass of water from the bar. A woman in a red dress buttonholes Perkins and talks about all those polls showing Mitt Romney losing to Barack Obama. ?The polls said Ted Cruz was going to lose in Texas,? she says. ?So why do we trust the polls??

Does Perkins think the polls are wrong? ?I do,? he says. ?Just anecdotally, I?ve been all over the country, and it?s a night-and-day difference between 2008 and 2012. The apathy that dominated in 2008 is gone.? But the media?the media is worse than it was, even then. ?They don?t even hide their bias anymore,? says Perkins. ?They just very clearly attack conservatives and conservative ideas, and appear to be in the tank for Barack Obama. When the president uses his bully pulpit to attack marriage, they can portray people who disagree with the president as extremists. So they do.?

The MRC is celebrating 25 years in the business of mocking, debunking, and protesting the mainstream media. It did not invent this mission, but it mastered it. Accuracy in Media, founded in 1969 as Richard Nixon?s allies were honing an anti-MSM case, pulls in less than $1 million per year. The MRC raised $12.6 million last year, funding everything from the Newsbusters blog to the Newsbusted webcast to Founder and President Brent Bozell?s tireless campaign against ?raunch.?

Right now, they?re sort of losing. The whole conservative apparatus that?s supposed to cancel out media bias?it?s not working. Barack Obama?s winning. The Huffington Post is providing AOL?s political coverage. MSNBC reverse-engineered Fox News? approach to proud, ideological news analysis, and it?s beating CNN. (Disclosure: I?m a contributor to MSNBC.) Before the dinner starts, I run into Accuracy in Media?s Cliff Kincaid. He tells me to read his latest column, but since we?re pressed for time, he sums it up: Mitt Romney refuses to take on the media, and it?s ruining him.

?Too many of Romney?s advisers are going to make money no matter who wins,? says Kincaid. On the other hand, there?s Joel Gilbert, who?s been trying (with AIM?s help) to sell a movie about Obama?s alleged genetic ties to Frank Marshall Davis, a black Communist who mentored the future president. The media won?t read the FBI file that AIM secured four years ago. Gilbert can?t get newspapers to take his money for full-page ads promoting the Davis theory. ?It?s so bad this time you can?t even pay to get your ads in the Washington Post and USA Today!? Gilbert is now sending his movie to ?millions? of households through the mail, so there are ways around the media, but it?s hardly convenient.

At 7 p.m. we?re ushered into the dining hall. Our tables face a stage flanked by titanic TV screens and ceiling-high banners. The DisHonors Awards, the annual prizes for the most ludicrous on-camera quotes from the media, will be splayed across those banners and those screens. Bozell, wearing the kind of white tuxedo coat that James Bond prefers in Monaco, is visible from multiple angles. The audience mills around, and then the screens switch to an image of Keith Olbermann, vintage footage from the MSNBC days. ?Shut the hell up,? thunders Max Headroom/Olbermann. We do.

Before we start making fun of the press, we?re inculcated with culture. Our invocation will come from the Rev. Terence Henry of the Franciscan University of Steubenville, who?d been hard to miss, walking through the tuxedoed throngs in a black robe.

?Father Terence made national news,? says the emcee, ?when he announced that, in response to President Obama?s attack on religious freedoms, Franciscan University was going to drop its student health program rather than participate in ?a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church and the sacredness of human life.? ? It?s the first big applause line of the night. Henry takes his place and quotes G.K. Chesterton: ?We do not need censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.? That?s the second applause line. Then the Pledge of Allegiance is led, via video, by Bozell?s son and some his fellow marines in Afghanistan. The Great Hall fills up with applause.

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