#1637: Dan Gainor

Yeah, we’re on a roll with them, so here you go: Dan Gainor, journalist and leader of the Business Media Institute (BMI), a branch of L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, and director of its Culture and Media Institute (taking the reins after Robert Knight), whose goal is “to advance, preserve, and help restore America’s culture, character, traditional values, and morals against the assault of the liberal media,” anti-gay activist. To illustrate the work of the BMI, their 2006 report is useful: It concludes that various TV programs, including Law & Order, were “biased against business.” Beyond businesses, according to Gainor, the media is conspiring against Christians; the media is for instance covertly attacking Christianity by reporting on sports (instead of religion) and by covering non-Christian faiths. And GEORGE SOROS IS BEHIND IT‼‼ Gainor didn’t like the movie “Norm of the North” either (because “Norm goes on his own little polar bear jihad against capitalism”). Another BMI report accused the news networks of bias in favor of the Gardasil vaccine; yes, the BMI is anti-vaccine as well, though they attack vaccines from the fire-and-brimstone side where disease is considered just punishment for sin rather than from the point of view of flaky woo.

Currently, Gainor and his group have had a particular focus on homosexuality, however. So, according to Gainor, marriage equality advocates will “undermine our entire country and everything that made us free.” And to achieve this goal, those advocates have coopted the media, who is now engaging in “full-blown fascist propaganda" tactics to promote marriage equality. And thus, “it’s Christians who stand up to traditional marriage who are actually the ones being discriminated against” (quote by Efrem Graham that Gainor endorsed). So, yes – that kind: like any good paranoid conspiracy theorist, Gainor thinks that those who disagree with him not only, you know, disagree with him, but that they want to “kick us out of the country, lock us up, or shoot us,” which sounds strikingly like psychological projection. Here is the Culture and Media Institute’s Andrew Collins on the show Glee (and here is Paul Wilson giving his two cents as well).

It’s not only gay rights, though. Gainor also thinks that 2007 snowstorms in Denver prove that there is a “Northeast bias” on global warming – if the leftist media had been living in Colorado than on the East Coast, they would have been more skeptical of global warming. Since that’s how climate science works.

In general, Gainor’s stated goal is to combat bias in the media. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the faintest clue how biases actually work or how to recognize them. A telling example of that is his recent pronouncement that now that NBC has terminated its financial relationship with Donald Trump, no one from that channel can cover the Republican primaries now because they’re “biased”: “No NBC reporter is now qualified to cover the presidential election,” said Gainor. “They have chosen an activist position – and the same goes for Univision. If they don’t want to discipline their president of content, then they’ve made their decision: they’re an activist organization, not a news organization.” But if they had retained Trump’s show and thereby had a direct financial connection to him worth millions (for both)? (And as Ed Brayton points out, one wonders what Gainor would say if one of the networks was invested in a television series with Hillary Clinton worth millions of dollars.) Anyways, to Gainor it is an example of classic liberal media bias: “They are picking and choosing who the American public is allowed to see, interact with, and vote for” by dropping the show, concluded Gainor. “That’s not their role.” Words fail.

Diagnosis: Ah, yes: With all his might Gainor is trying to combat bias in the media. However, when your general outlook is best characterized by delusional paranoia and motivated reasoning turned into (something close to) an art form, this is what the result will look like. It’s not pretty.