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Brent Baker

Editor At Large
@ BrentHBaker

Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) is the Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow and Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center (MRC), the publisher of NewsBusters. He’s been the central figure in the MRC’s News Analysis Division since the MRC’s 1987 founding and in 2005 spearheaded the launch of NewsBusters.

Baker oversaw the selection of the award nominees and “winners” for the MRC’s “DisHonors Awards” (highlight video clips on NewsBusters), presented at an annual gala, and each week he helps the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard select a “Liberal Media Scream.” Those picks are added, on a one week delay, to NewsBusters.

In 2001, Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes dubbed Baker “the scourge of liberal bias.”

For 13 years, 1996 through 2009, he compiled and edited the daily CyberAlert e-mail and online report. In late May of 2009 the CyberAlert became an e-mail-only product based on BiasAlert postings on the MRC's Web site until it was discontinued in 2015. 

From 1988 through 2015 he served as Editor of Notable Quotables (archive), a two-page newsletter which delivered a bi-weekly compilation of quotes from the liberal media which reflected biased reporting. At each year-end, an annual “awards for the year’s worst reporting” were selected by a panel of judges. (NQ collections on NewsBusters since 2016). From 1988 to 1999 he also oversaw MediaWatch, a monthly and later bi-weekly newsletter which the MRC discontinued in order to concentrate efforts on more timely analysis via the Internet.

Baker is the author of How to Identify, Expose & Correct Liberal Media Bias, a 1994 book which offers detailed explanations and suggestions for what the average citizen can do about media bias. Baker was co-editor of And That’s the Way It Isn’t: A Reference Guide to Media Bias, a 1990 book containing excerpts, reprints and summaries of 45 studies documenting the media's liberal bias during the 1980s.

Baker lived in Massachusetts through high school, whereupon he fled the liberal commonwealth for George Washington University in DC and, since graduation, a life in Northern Virginia. He edited the conservative college student newspaper The Sequent and graduated from GWU with special honors in political science in 1985.

After a stint at Conservative Digest magazine, Baker joined Brent Bozell at the National Conservative Foundation (as editor of the newsletter Newswatch) before helping to create the MRC in 1987.

An avid fan of the Washington Capitals NHL hockey team, in January of 2009 the Washington Post's "DC Sports Bog" took note of Baker's attendance at a Caps game with John Kerry: "The Caps, John Kerry and a Scourge."

Bio on MRC.org.


Latest Blogs

ABC on Terror Suspect, Everything But a Muslim: ‘Marine Lance Corpor

Brent Baker
June 17th, 2011 9:07 PM

ABC Uniquely Highlights Report Showing Obama Worse than Bush on Paying

Brent Baker
June 16th, 2011 10:30 AM

CNN Gives Maher Platform to Accuse GOP Candidates of ‘Horrible Socie

Brent Baker
June 15th, 2011 8:42 AM

CBS’s Schieffer Trumpets Coburn’s ‘Candor’ on Willingness to H

Brent Baker
June 14th, 2011 1:51 AM

NBC Most Excited by Palin’s E-Mail, Yet Fails to Dig Up Any ‘Bombs

Brent Baker
June 13th, 2011 8:45 AM

CBS Worries Weiner’s Scandal Means Obama Will Lose a Vital Critic fr

Brent Baker
June 7th, 2011 10:51 AM

ABC’s Amanpour Chafes Over Focus on Debt, Pushes for ‘Another Stim

Brent Baker
June 6th, 2011 4:19 AM

ABC Scurrilously Implies Trimming Federal Spending Will Lead to More D

Brent Baker
June 2nd, 2011 8:14 AM

Unlike ABC and CBS, NBC’s Williams Spikes Weinergate Yet Has Time fo

Brent Baker
June 1st, 2011 8:45 PM

AP’s Babington Warns of Damage ‘Hard-Right’ Positions Cause GOP

Brent Baker
June 1st, 2011 1:43 AM

Video: ‘Bastard in the Sand’ Parody Sung by Martin Short Accompani

Brent Baker
May 30th, 2011 11:04 PM

Sunday Highlights: CBS’s Smith Wonders If Tea Party ‘Losing’ Its

Brent Baker
May 30th, 2011 9:23 AM

C-SPAN Aired MRC's 'DisHonors Awards' Saturday Night; Video Now Online

Brent Baker
May 29th, 2011 2:20 AM

Nets Douse a Potential Palin Presidential Bid: Too ‘Divisive’ and

Brent Baker
May 27th, 2011 10:00 AM

Humiliated Ed Schultz: ‘Laura Ingraham, I Am Sorry, Very Sorry’ fo

Brent Baker
May 26th, 2011 1:26 AM

MSNBC Suspends Ed Schultz After He Calls Laura Ingraham a ‘Right-Win

Brent Baker
May 25th, 2011 8:12 PM

CBS Concerned ‘Palestinians Were Not Impressed’ by Netanyahu’s A

Brent Baker
May 24th, 2011 11:27 PM

Diane Sawyer on Tornadoes: ‘This Is the Evidence of a Kind of Previe

Brent Baker
May 24th, 2011 9:09 AM

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell Regrets Republicans Lack ‘Courage’ to Rais

Brent Baker
May 22nd, 2011 6:17 PM

Couric’s Review of Her CBS Years Finds New Way to Embarrass Palin, L

Brent Baker
May 20th, 2011 12:43 AM