Topic: Media Research Center
Two recent trends -- the Media Research Center's embrace of WorldNetDaily-style far-right sensationalism and WND's obsession with maliciously portraying Hillary Clinton as suffering from myriad health issues as "diagnosed" by right-wing doctors who have never examined her -- come together in an Aug. 27 NewsBusters rant by factually challenged Trump-fluffer Jeffrey Lord.
Lord is upset that fact-checkers at the Washington Post pointed out that there isn't any actual evidence that Hillary has any serious health problems and gave Donald Trump's claim otherwise four Pinocchios. Lord responded by citing a Carl Bernstein book noting that Hillary had trouble keeping up with her husband in the early years of his presidency. Let the birther -- er, healther screed begin, Jeffrey:
And there it is. The flat out statement as fact that way back there in 1993 the then-46 year old First Lady of the United States was seen by her aides as being “physically exhausted” by her duties, that she “lacked” her husband’s stamina and in fact was so exhausted by simple Capital Hill appearances that she would “collapse in the car on the way back to the White House.”
Hmm. Did Mr. Kessler the “Fact Checker” ever bother checking the reporting of one of the best reporters in the history of his own paper? Did Mr. Borchers? Obviously, not. So what we get instead from them both is the assertion that Donald Trump has lied with an “unsubstantiated ‘stamina' argument” about Hillary Clinton when in fact it has been very much substantiated by Carl Bernstein who got the information from Hillary Clinton’s own staff members.
This is the kind of horse hockey that passes as “fact checking” today. It is called “fact checking” when in fact it is nothing more than one more set of factual misstatements coming from a virulently anti-Trump paper. A paper that has, no kidding, said this on its editorial page about Trump: “Mr. Trump is pathologically dishonest and morally bankrupt.”
Today, of course, Hillary Clinton is no longer 46 years old. She is about to turn 70. Logic dictates that a person who had stamina problems at 46, by the account of her own staff, would have even more stamina problems a full 23 years later. Yet, with the fact of her stamina problems fully evident in a biography by one of the most respected and well-known journalists of the day - and, I might add, no conservative - the media not only totally ignores.
And, thus, the WND-ization of the MRC, as well as the MRC's Jeffrey Lord problem, continues apace.
