Topic: Media Research Center
Right-wing snob (and terrible media critic) Tim Graham is at his lame ways again, this time over the influx of right-wing media outlets in the White House briefing room.
In a March 11 Media Research Center post, attacked the Washington Post for highlighting that a right-wing partisan, Fred Lucas of the Heritaqge Foundation-operated Daily Signal, served as a pool reporter.
Graham then uses a March 13 post to rant about "the leftist snobs at The New Yorker" for noting the right-wing influx in "a snide piece full of anonymous whiners." Graham whined that the Post accurately referred to the DailySignal as a partisan outlet:
But the Times and the Post have walls between editorial and opinion. Can the Daily Signal say that? Can Graham say that about any right-wing outlet? Indeed, Graham merely regurgitates Daily signal editor Rob Bluey's unsubstantiated assertion that there's "a hard firewall" between Heritage's partisan operations and the Daily Signal.Let that sink in. The Washington Post, describing itself as somehow outside the “partisan press.” MSNBC, outside the “partisan press”? The New York Times, with the front-page essay on the need for “oppositional” media to defeat Trump and elect Hillary, outside the “partisan press”?
Graham does eventually get around to a bit of relevant disclosure: "Fred Lucas is a friend and a veteran of MRC’s news outlet, CNSNews.com. So is Rob Bluey, who runs the Daily Signal."
Lucas (pictured above) was a highly biased reporter during his time at CNS, fearmongering about the alleged hazards of fluorescent light bulbs, peddling anti-Obama conspiracies and maliciously attacking Obama's family. Bluey, meanwhile, did misleading reporting on the anti-John Kerry Swift Boat Vets (that benefited the Swift Boaters) while at CNS.
With such biased people running the Daily Signal, let's not pretend there's any meaningful "firewall" between it and the rest of Heritage -- just as there is no meaningful fifewall between CNS and the rest of the MRC. If the jobs of Bluey and Lucas were not to push Heritage's agenda, they wouldn't be working there.
Of course, Graham's playing a zero-sum game here: He thinks any reporter who's not reliably right-wing is "liberal."
Graham seems to also take offense at the title of the New Yorker piece, "Is Trump Trolling The White House Press Corps?" But he's curiously silent about, nor does he excerpt, the part of the piece that answers the headline's question: a captured conversation between Jim Hoft, head of right-wing blog Gateway Pundit and the stupidest person on the internet, and his new White House reporter, Lucian Winritch, who said that a conservative-media friend told him "You were brought in to troll the press corps, and you’d better troll hard." Hoft himself is quoted saying of Winritch: "He's there to troll."
Graham, of course, is too busy smugly hurling insults like "'Smug Little Cartel' is an excellent summation of The New Yorker" to say anything intelliggent about this. Perhaps because he wants right-wing trolls in the White House press corps to be tossing softballs to Sean Spicer.
Need proof? Just six hours before Graham's rant was posted, an MRC post by Kyle Drennen touted one of those softball questions from a right-wing reporter:
Responding to a question from The Daily Caller’s Kaitlan Collins during Monday’s White House press briefing about slanted media coverage of ObamaCare, Sean Spicer accused journalists of ignoring the failures of the health care law and instead portraying it as “all rainbows and puppies.”
Collins wondered: “How is the press making ObamaCare look good?” Spicer began his response by observing: “Well, I think when you see some of these comparisons [between ObamaCare and the GOP replacement plan] that occur in they talk about who’s gonna win and who’s gonna lose, it misses a lot of the competition that's going to take place. It doesn't talk about the increased choice [in the GOP plan].”
That's exactly the kind of right-wing propaganda that Graham wants to hear.
