Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center still can't get its act together regarding whether it should denounce or defend Donald Trump.
In a March 1 post, Ken Shepherd praises the Daily Beast for uncovering Trump denouncing Ronald Reagan as weak in 1987. Shepherd adds his own denunciation of Trump for good measure:
There's always a willing audience for doom-and-gloom populists who insist that only they have the key to restoring American "greatness," all the while heaping praise on other, less democratic regimes for supposedly being smarter, more successful, and potentially more enduring than our constitutional regime.
Trump's answer has always been electing the right hard-nosed bully, not in trusting the genius and greatness of the American people to fuel the nation's economic progress.
Kudos to Daly for reminding us all just how wrong, and consistently wrong, Trump has been with his simplistic populist messages and denunciation of real conservatives.
Then literally three hours and 27 minutes later, MRC Latino's Edgard Portela rushed to Trump's defense over the whole KKK thing:
The portrayal of Donald Trump as a racist continues full bore on Univision and Telemundo.
On Monday evening, the national evening newscasts of both networks craftily played up Trump’s stumbling Sunday morning answer to CNN’s Jake Tapper on the question of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s endorsement.
It’s clear that both networks committed journalistic malpractice by completely ignoring Trump’s unequivocal rejection of Duke’s endorsement just the Friday before, as well as his repetition of his rejection of the endorsement both Sunday afternoon on Twitter and Monday morning on NBC’s Today show.
In their woefully incomplete coverage of the important matter, the agenda of portraying Trump as a KKK-embracing racist could not be more patently manifest.
Portela conveniently ignored what exactly Trump did during the Jake Tapper appearance: he said nothing stronger than "I don't know anything about David Duke, OK?" even after Tapper asked him three times to disavow Duke and the KKK.
It's interesting, however, that the MRC is not going after Tapper for asking the question -- even they realize he was as fair as one could be about it, giving him three full chances to answer. So Portela had to bash outlets for reporting it and not all the times Trump wasn't a racist.
Which seems to contradict the MRC's whole anti-Trump vibe. You'd think Shepherd, as NewsBusters managing editor, would be cool with Trump being portrayed as a racist.
