Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Ryan Foley did his best to downplay as old news the significance of the New York Times' report on how Donald Trump lost massive amounts of money in the 1980s and 1990s -- and even proof that Trump is a total success now -- devoting a May 9 post to bashing CNN's Don Lemon for bringing it up.
If Lemon had bothered to do his homework, he would have found out that this Earth-shattering news has been out in the open for a long time. The New York tabloids heavily covered Trump’s financial woes and Trump himself admitted on the pilot episode of The Apprentice that “it wasn’t always so easy. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt.”
In spite of his past difficulties, even The New York Times had to admit that President Trump turned his financial situation around. So, Lemon’s premise that President Trump was lying about his success is just not true.
CNN’s obsession with President Trump’s decades old tax returns continued on Wednesday night.
Nicholas Fondacaro pushed the same narrative a few days later: "After The New York Times published their story last week about President Trump losing $1 billion in the 80s and 90s, did you feel like you already knew about that? So did everyone else, because Trump’s financial problems during that time were well documented." He praised Fox News ranter Greg Gutfeld for "suggesting the paper just discovered the popularity of the movie Home Alone and the singer Vanilla Ice." Gutfeld then "turned to call out the liberal media writ large for all reading off the same 'script' and being 'sheep,'" Fondacaro declared.
First: We just doucmented how the MRC sheepishly reads from the same script as the rest of the right-wing media in pushing the dubious narrative that the internet discriminates against conservatives, so Fondacaro might want to slow his roll on that.
Second: These complaints about covering old news might have some validity if the MRC hadn't just devoted itself to covering even older news.
The day before Foley's post, the MRC's Alexis Moutevelis Coombs wrote about a 50-year-old story: "Almost 10 years after the death of Democrat Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy of Massachusetts, and 50 years after the death of Mary Jo Kopechne -- and almost two years after a major Hollywood film on the incident -- the media are starting to finally reveal the truth about what happened at Chappaquiddick."
As Foley's post did, Coombs' item had a current hook -- an ABC docuseries episode on the incident -- Coombs didn't frame it as a "decades old" story despite it being decades older than the Trump tax story.
Then again, the MRC is so weirdly obsessed with Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick that it can't even bring itself to admit it has repeatedly -- and, we can say at this point, deliberately -- misinterpreted a writer's statement about Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne as praise rather than the criticism it was intended as.
