Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center, it seems, can't agree on the importance of newspaper endorsements for presidential candidates -- even from post to post.
On Oct. 20, Scott Whitlock raged against the very first presidential endorsement made by the country's largest newspaper, USA Today, because it was for Joe Biden:
Given that USA Today has never, technically, endorsed a presidential candidate before, the paper touted this as historic and important. But, as the opening paragraph of the 1775 word pronouncement noted, just four years ago the paper demanded that Americans not vote for Trump. That, of course, is very close to endorsing Hillary Clinton.
[...]
[Editor-in-chief Nicole] Carroll went on to promote USA Today as ideologically diverse: “The 10-member Editorial Board includes conservatives, liberals and centrists.” Yet the decision was “unanimous.”
So not one member, even among the "centrist" or "conservative" wing of the USA Today editorial board supported Trump? Yes, this all sounds very “non-partisan.” This is the same USA Todaythat has begun producing “fact checks” for the paper, including one in July that declared it “false” to say the Democrats started the Civil War and founded the KKK. (They absolutely did both. Here's my fact check of the fact check.)
In fairness, credit to USA Today write an op-ed responding to the editorial.
The paper closed the editorial by insisting the endorsement was a one-time deal: “We may never endorse a presidential nominee again. In fact, we hope we'll never have to.” However, once you start endorsing Democrats, it can be hard to stop.
By contrast, Tim Graham spent an entire Oct. 26 post dismissing the importance of the New Hampshire Union Leader, a longtime conservartive newspaper, endorsing Biden. He started by attacking CNN's for getting something wrong regarding the endorsement, then admitting he was right after all:
CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza tried to hype a newspaper endorsement with this headline: "This influential newspaper just broke a 100-plus year streak of endorsing a Republican." But it was false.
The New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed the Libertarian ticket in 2016. Cillizza actually included this fact in his article, that the newspaper touted Gary Johnson and Bill Weld as "a bright light of hope and reason."
How can CNN bungle the facts so badly?
Graham then complained that Cillizza's statement that "It's hard to overstate the influence of the Union Leader in conservative circles" was "false" because it had endorsed Chris Christie in the 2016 Republican primary and not Trump. We would remind Graham that his boss, Brent Bozell, supported Ted Cruz in 2016 before he and the rest of the MRC did the big Trump flip. Does he think his boss lacks influence?
When the Union Leader editorial pointed out that Trump was "forcing a reexamination of what words like "Republican" and "conservative" even mean, Graham went all ranty:
It is absolutely a "reexamination" of what "conservative" means when a "conservative" newspaper complains about the national debt: "Since Trump took over, the national debt has exploded by more than 7 TRILLION dollars." So the answer to that problem is....Joe Biden? As if the Democrats in the House did NOT pass spending bills exploding the debt? As if Biden isn't proposing a massive spending increase? At least they acknowledged a blue wave would be a disaster and urged split-ticket voting. But one might call the editorial page there "formerly conservative."
PS: Brent Baker -- who vacations in New Hampshire -- pointed out the Union Leader still endorsed Republicans for the U.S. House and Senate -- which may also demonstrate their endorsements don't matter.
We would also remind Graham that Terry Jeffrey, editor in chief of the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, is such a Trump fanboy that he can't quite bring himself to criticize the person who's most responsible for running up that $7 trillion debt.
The MRC flipped back to caring about newspaper endorsements three days later, when Geoffey Dickens complained about all the newspapers endorsing Biden:
With just five days to go, polls show a tight race in many of the key battleground states. But one place where the race isn’t tight: newsrooms across America. The country’s newspapers have absolutely thumped Donald Trump in their official endorsements, favoring Joe Biden by a count of (88) to (7).
Out of a total of (95) newspapers that have offered an editorial on who their readers should vote for, 88 (93 percent) of them have endorsed Joe Biden. Only seven (The Las Vegas Review Journal, Santa Barbara News-Press, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Spokesman-Review, The New York Post, The Washington Times and Boston Herald) have advised voting for Trump.
Dickens avoided mentioning the relevant that all of those newspapers have an explicitly conservative agenda and/or conservative owners.
