Topic: Media Research Center
It's not just Jennifer Rubin: It seems that any conservative who dares to be critical of Donald Trump has earned the opportunity to be Heathered by the Media Research Center.
One of those is Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes. Years ago, the MRC came to Sykes' defense after another radio host made a nasty remark about the death of Sykes' mother in a house fire. Back when the MRC was anti-Trump in early 2016, it noted that Sykes conducted a tough interview with Trump.
But the MRC flip-flopped and boarded the Trump train, while Sykes didn't. Cue the Heathering.
In a Feb. 8 post, Curtis Houck called Sykes a "former conservative host" and complained that he appeared on MSNBC "to lambaste conservative media (like the one you’re reading) for being why no one trusts mainstream media in the age of Trump and alternative facts" and launched "an exclusive attack on conservatives for supposedly enabling President Trump to offer misstatements without consequences." Houck also complained that Sykes wrote a piece on the subject for the New York Times, which "sent liberals swooning."
Houck doesn't refute anything Sykes wrote or said; instead, he whines that Sykes had purportedly "fail[ed] to realize that he’s joined an echo-chamber in which Manhattan elites sit around reading The New York Times and The New Yorker while watching The Daily Show," then lamely blamed the "mainstream media" for starting all of this: "If Sykes wants to blame conservatives for simply pointing out the faults of the mainstream media, perhaps he should instead emphasize that legacy media should think twice before concocting untrue narratives or going forward with stories without sufficient fact-checking."
Houck offered some backhanded praise for Sykes in a March 29 post, claiming that in another appearance on MSNBC he "took time away from being the token right-of-center guest who agrees with his liberal colleagues on everything to push back on these praises for Obama’s environment moves in the last eight years."
On April 5, Brad Wilmouth grumbled that Sykes "took aim at President Trump" over his actions in Syria.
Wilmouth further trashed Sykes in an April 9 post, calling him "an alleged conservative guest for the purpose of having him bolster the views of the liberal host rather than provide a contrarian point of view." This time, though, it was over Sykes' telling the truth about Milwaukee County sheriff and right-wing darling David Clarke, whom Sykes said was using his uniform as a prop to push his political ambitions while being AWOL from his day job.
Another conservative who has gotten the Heathering treatment from the MRC is libertarian P.J. O'Rourke, who earned the scorn of Nicholas Fondacaro in a March 15 post by nothing that Trump is "a giant toddler and there's nothing going around inside his head except, you know, when do I get to suck my thumb next?" Fondacaro complained that the "toddler" insult is "nothing original" and "low hanging fruit," and huffed: "It’s difficult to determine what’s worse: their raging disdain for the President of the United States or their utter lack of creatively [sic] in their jokes."
