Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to complain about the "revolving door" of media people who go to work inside Democratic administrations -- but they get really snippy when it's pointed out that it's even more of an issue with Fox News employees who worked for the Trump administration. This time, in a Nov. 24 post, Nicholas Fondacaro lets a Fox News host do all the hypocritical handwaving:
With President-elect Biden stocking up on staff to fill his cabinet, we’re already starting to see the revolving door between politics and the liberal media begin to turn again. Fox News Channel media analyst and host of Media Buzz, Howard Kurtz was on the case Tuesday night as he pointed out the men and women of The Swamp who were leaving the CNN and MSNBC payrolls to go work for Biden. Of course, he also pointed out the hypocrisy of how Fox News was criticized with President Trump.
“As Joe Biden starts to staff his administration, the revolving door between media and politics is spinning once again,” Kurtz reported at the top of the Special Report segment.
[...]
After noting that President Obama had hired over two dozen journalists for his administration (the NewsBusters count had it at 30), Kurtz pointed out the liberal media’s hypocrisy. “That musical chairs tradition is widely viewed as routine, but Fox News drew criticism for those who moved between the network on the Trump administration, including John Bolton, Heather Nauert, Bill Shine, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” he said.
So the MRC came up with 30 people across the entire non-right-wing media of numerous outlets over an eight-year presidency. By contrast, 21 employees from just a single company, Fox News, worked for the Trump administration -- which doesn't even count Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle not just becoming Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend but vociferously campaigning for Trump's re-election. Despite the apples-and-oranges comparison, Fondacaro rushed to join Kurtz in hypocritically screaming "hypocrisy!" cheering how "Kurtz called out CNN’s Trump attacker turned Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken":
That hypocrisy largely came from the likes of CNN. In the summer of 2018, Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter pontificated about how there had “never” been a “love story” like Trump and Fox News. “Fox and Trump, Trump and Fox. You know they're close. But do you realize just how close” he declared at the time. “[T]his kind of relationship has never existed between a U.S. president and a TV network. It. Is. Unprecedented.” Meanwhile, CNN had already failed to inform viewers of Blinken’s change of position.
And in March of 2018, Anderson Cooper did an entire segment complaining: “It's a presidency that was essentially born on reality TV, and now the lines between reality and TV may be blurring even further.” He was saying that because Trump had taken Larry Kudlow from CNBC to be the director of the United States National Economic Council.
In that 2018 post, Fondacaro played the same hypocrisy card, falsely pretending that Trump's obsession with a single media outlet, and vice versa is exactly the same thing as people from numerous companies choosing to work for a Democratic administration, whining that it was "totally false" for Stelter to point out "the handful of Fox News people Trump had hired and suggested that Fox News was “propp[ing] up” the Trump presidency as if without them it would collapse."
When Stelter brought up Guilfoyle dating Trump Jr., Fondacaro went into whataboutism mode:
While Stelter tried to make their dating sound out of the ordinary, the liberal media was actually married into the Obama administration.
According to The Washington Post, “CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides,” who was Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state. ABC reporter Claire Shipman was actually married to then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, so where were the concerns about all of ABC being tainted by their marriage? There’s a lot more where those came from.
Of course, there's a difference between being married to the deputy secretary of state -- a non-political job -- and being the girlfriend of the president's son and trading on her Fox News fame in actively campaigning for Trump, which Fondacaro offered no evidence Moseley ever did. (Deputy news bureau chiefs don't have that kind of fame, something that apparently escaped Fondadcaro.) Also, ABC was not "tainted" by Shipman's marriage to Carney because Shipman stopped covering politics when Carney, a former journalist, became press secretary.
Fondacaro closed his post by huffing, "It’s only a matter of time before the Biden administration started to hire the “journalists” that covered him and helped to prop up his campaign." But neither of the two people he named immediately prior to that -- Stelter and Cooper -- have indicated they will leave their CNN positions to work for Biden.
Fondacaro is so deep into his hypocrisy (and his deliberate lies) that he can't see how ridiculous he looks.
