Topic: Media Research Center
When conservative writers spearheaded an attack on Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, the MRC couldn't wait to jump on it with its usual why-won't-the-liberal-media push our narrative spin. From an Oct. 7 post by Kristine Marsh:
Just like in 2016, the networks have done their best to ignore Democrat presidential candidate scandals and lies while harping on everything surrounding Donald Trump. After capitalizing on her grossly exaggerated Native American ancestry, frontrunner Elizabeth Warren has been caught in another lie, by her own words from twelve years ago. However, you wouldn’t know this if you only watched ABC, NBC and CBS.
In the last several months, Warren has been rehashing a story about how she was fired by a principal ending her first year of teaching, because she was “visibly pregnant,” several times. She told this story half a dozen times (it even made her autobiography), but most recently this past Wednesday.
[...]
But you wouldn't hear a peep about this story from the networks. The story has gained a lot of traction in conservative media circles this weekend, but so far the networks have been out to lunch.
The gist of this spin was that Warren is somehow lying about her past either now or in 2007 when she stated that she left her teaching job to go to law school -- school districts at the time typically fired or otherwise let go teachers who were pregnant. But Marsh would never admit that those "conservative media circles" are biased by failing to tell the full story. Indeed, she gleefully ads that "Only Fox News has been covering the story, so far"without acknowledging Fox's unambiguous bias.
The next day, professional liar Nicholas Fondacaro ramped things up by screaming that Warren "LIES" in his headline, touting how "The Washington Free Beacon caught her in another apparent lie. This time it was about allegedly being fired from a teaching gig for being 'visibly pregnant.'" Pushing the biased-media narrative, Fondacaro huffed that "Instead of reporting on Warren, ABC and NBC touted polls that showed a majority of Americans supported the impeachment inquiry into President Trump" but happiliy touted that "The only evening news program to cover Warren’s dubious claims was the Fox News Channel’s Special Report," pretending to be oblivious to Fox News' own bias.
Tim Graham similarly screamed "LIES" in his headline, declaring that "she's been lying about this tale -- repeatedly." Scott Whitlock -- perhaps understanding where his colleagues don't that no lie has been proven -- instead focused on "contradictory facts" and expressing pleasure that one report highlighted previous "scrutiny over her claims of Native American ancestry."
Clay Waters, meanwhile, got mad when the New York Times pointed out that it was a right wing-generated smear, complaining that "The paper aided her in changing the subject to a more general phenomenon of the time, when women lost jobs for becoming pregnant," ultimately whining without evidence: "It was actually a Socialist magazine, Jacobin, that first challenged Warren’s account, but the Times probably knows its liberal fanbase would have a reliably Pavlov-type reaction on Twitter when baited with the phrase 'conservative news site.'"
Two days later, Waters returned to rage at the Times again, this time for having "hurled the “sexism” card at the GOP for daring to show Warren in a lie about the circumstances of her leaving a teaching position in 1971," adding more fact-free speculation: "The press may be fighting her corner so fiercely on this because the contradiction lies across an ideological faultline, with Warren’s new story about a pregnancy-motivated firing more amenable to the Democratic feminist view of the world than her original story, in which she shouldered the responsibility."
Graham similarly wasn't done whining, returning to complain that a Washington Post columnist "took great exception to conservative news sources saying Warren 'lied' -- the opposite of how liberals insist the L-word needs to be used against Trump as often as possible." Graham, by the way, is an apologist on behalf of Trump's voluminous falsehoods.
But neither Graham nor anyone else at the MRC or the right-wing media has proven a "lie" on Warren's part, and you'll never hear Graham admit that inconvenient fact.
