Topic: Media Research Center
The death of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer set off all the feels at his ideological buddies at the Media Research Center. So, needless to say, they took things in a weird direction by bashing the media for highlighting something that conservatives used to be proud of.
Nicholas Fondacaro complained in a June 21 post about Washington Post's obituary on Krauthammer:
[T]he paper’s obituary editor, Adam Bernstein found that Krauthammer’s life could be boiled down to his position on the Iraq War. “Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist and intellectual provocateur who championed the muscular foreign policy of neoconservatism that helped lay the ideological groundwork for the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq,b died June 21 at 68,” he BEGAN the paper’s remembrance, setting the tone.
"He was festooned with honors by right-leaning groups and sought after by Republican policymakers,” Bernstein continued. “ To the left, Dr. Krauthammer was a bogeyman, most notably on the matter of President George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and the ultimately catastrophic efforts to democratize the Middle East.”
Bernstein tried to place the war dead at Krauthammer’s feet, saying:
The U.S.-led invasion, which Dr. Krauthammer billed at the outset as a “Three Week War,” has dragged on ever since, caused more than 4,000 U.S. deaths and more than 100,000 Iraqi casualties amid a grinding insurgency, and left the United States mired in a failed state with hostile neighbors.
Fondacaro never explained why linking Krauthammer to the Iraq War was a bad thing, let alone inaccurate. Instead, he huffed: "Dr. Charles Krauthammer was a prolific intellectual and he will be missed by many."
The next day, Richard Howell similarly complained that an MSNBC's Brian Williams "was unable to resist laying blame for the Iraq War at the feet of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer." He further complained:
More accurately, Krauthammer postulated that history might remember the invasion as the “Three Week War” and wrote those words the day after troops had occupied Baghdad after three weeks of invasion. Strangely, Williams felt necessary to point this out, and seemed to lay blame for the conflict on Krauthammer. It's particularly ironic since Williams was removed as NBC Nightly News anchor for falsely reporting on his own experiences in Iraq.
In an otherwise praising obituary, it was jarring to hear Williams shade Krauthammer's views on Iraq. Perhaps the MSNBC host was simply following The Washington Post's lead, which made sure to include Krauthammer's support for the war in the opening sentence of its obituary of him on Thursday.
Like Fondadcaro, Howell didn't explain why it's such a horrible thing to mention Krauthammer's intellectual foundation for the Iraq War. When did the MRC cease being proud of it?
