Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is so far to the right that it thinks anyone who continually spout right-wing, pro-Trump propaganda is a "liberal." Which is why, despite treating Fox News with kid globes, it has long despised news anchor Shepard Smith for actually living up to the fair-and-balanced slogan the channel had for years. An Aug. 29 post by Mark Finkelstein, reacting badly to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough saying "In Shep We Trust," summed up the prevailing anti-Shep attitude at the MRC: "On everything from downplaying the problems associated with illegal immigration, to defending the Clintons against charges of profiteering, to suggesting President Trump bore responsibility for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Smith reliably toes the liberal line."
Suffice it to say that when Smith abruptly announced he was leaving Fox News, the MRC was all too happy to help the channel shove him out the door. It didn't start that way at first; Curtis Houck's Oct. 11 post announcing Smith's departure was largely straightforward and free of snark, though he did insist that Smith was "a straight news anchor with a penchant to lean leftward that ingratiated him with the anti-Fox crowd and liberal media elites." But the bashing began soon afterward -- a Twitter thread later that day rehashed the MRC's hatred of Smith, snarling: "'Straight news'? 'Just the facts'? Don't buy that myth."
The MRC's chief Smith-hater, Tim Graham, could only sputter whataboutisms in responding to people who lamented Smith's departure. He ranted in an Oct. 12 post:
NPR's longtime loathing of Fox News approached Maximum Shamelessness on Friday night when NPR anchor Ari Shapiro suggested that Shepard Smith abruptly leaving Fox looked like "a purge based on purity." As if NPR has a pile of conservatives on staff for balance?
[...]
The notion that Shep Smith didn't take a side is just as ridiculous as The New York Times when it used the motto "without fear or favor."
Graham's Smith-bashing (and deflectionary whataboutism) got even more unhined in an Oct. 18 post:
The Drudge Report is passing along an article by Gerry Smith at Bloomberg hitting the predictable and hyperbolic note that somehow, Chris Wallace is the only remaining example of "news" at Fox News after Shepard Smith suddenly resigned. The headline carried a Big Gulp of hyperbole: "Meet the New Face of the Trump Resistance at Fox News."
Pointed questions to this administration don't equal #Resistance. This is the same Wallace that thought CNN's White House Resister Jim Acosta "embarrassed himself" by yelling at the president about a caravan of illegal immigrants.
Smith's experts all lined up with the CNN mantra that Fox can't handle the "truth" and "realism" is defined as insisting Trump is coming mentally unglued.
Then again -- given that the MRC has never objected to it -- Graham probably thinks that Wallace was being fair and balanced whwen he gave Republican politician Paul Ryan a birthday cake in 2012.
