Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has done a lot of whining about the whistleblower that got the ball rolling on President Trump's impeachment inquiry. It also went the whataboutism route via a hoary old Clinton Equivocation -- something the MRC did a lot of in 2016 to deflect from Trump's sleazy behavior. Rich Noyes wrote in an Oct. 2 item (boldface in original):
The anonymous whistleblower who complained about President Trump’s July phone conversation with the leader of Ukraine is being touted and toasted across the liberal media, but it was a far different story 21 years ago when a Pentagon employee named Linda Tripp helped bring Bill Clinton’s perjury and obstruction of justice to the attention of Independent Counsel Ken Starr.
For daring to undermine a Democratic President, the media had nothing but contempt for Tripp, who journalists disdained as a “pathetic, self-destroying older loser,” a “treacherous, back-stabbing, good-for-nothing enemy of the truth.” Time’s Margaret Carlson said Tripp “lost membership in the family of man” by recording her phone conversations with Clinton’s paramour, Monica Lewinsky. CNBC’s Geraldo Rivera said Tripp was a “betrayer on the order of Benedict Arnold,” while Newsweek tagged her a “friend-betraying Cruella de Vil.”
In an online poll, ABCNews.com put Tripp in the same league as mass butchers Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Even after impeachment, journalists felt comfortable using Tripp’s name as an epithet, as when NBC’s Katie Couric scolded George Stephanopoulos as “kinda creepy... a Linda-Tripp type,” because his memoir included too much personal information about Bill Clinton: “You’re airing all the dirty laundry, and some people just think that’s sorta gross.”
Noyes is whitewashing what Tripp did. She didn't reveal Clinton's "perjury and obstruction of justice"; she secretly recorded phone conversations with Lewinsky and falsely pretended to be her friend, and the only thing her tapes did is show that Lewinsky and Clinton had an affair. Tripp did, in fact, betray Lewinsky. Further, the Trump whistleblower exposing the president trying to link foreign aid to another country in exchange for dirt on a political opponent exposes a much more severe offense than Tripp exposing that Clinton had an affair.
Noyes would never admit that, of course.
