Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham spent his Dec. 11 column whining that the right-wing hit job on Hunter Biden -- which the MRC has gleefully embraced -- was dismissed outside the right-wing media bubble as nothing more than a dirt-digging expedition:
Hunter Biden only survives "difficult challenges" and "emerges stronger" through the energetic strangling of his lobbying scandals by the mainstream media.
[...]
Add the spin in The New York Times' front-page headline the Sunday before Election Day: "Foiled Once, Giuliani's Team Peddles More Dirt." There were three photographs in the story: one of President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, one of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and one of Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. The story focused much more on their machinations than on Hunter's.
One could just as easily demonize the daily output of The Times in a similar way by referencing The Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger in a headline: "Foiled in 2016, Sulzberger's Team Peddles More Dirt on the Trumps."
Our media elite pretend that they're all for the free and democratic exchange of information, and for holding powerful people accountable. But the suppressed Hunter Biden scandal story underlines that they have been shaming anti-Democratic narratives by engaging in character assassination of the conservative media.
This is all projection, of course -- what he's accusing the "liberal media" of doing on Hunter Biden is exactly what the MRC did for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
While Graham complained that the Times pointed out how strategists close to Trump conspired with the New York Post to push the Hunter Biden story, things were much different when a tape of Trump disparaging women was released during the 2016 election. Graham's boss, Brent Bozell, rushed to Trump's defense by attacking NBC (which produced "Access Hollywood," the show where Trump made the off-the-record remarks) for allegedly sitting on the Trump tape and that "the timing was deliberate" for its release.
Graham himself worked to dismiss the story, complaining about "the ongoing obsession with women charging Donald Trump with sexual harassment." Graham and Bozell huffed in a column, "They say it was a recent discovery. No media October Surprise there, no siree," then changed the subject to the womanizing of Bill Clinton, who was not running in 2016.Graham also complained: "NBC and other liberal networks are politically savvy enough to know cynics will not believe you when you claim you suddenly discovered something touted as a political silver bullet with just a few weeks to go in the campaign. But that’s what they’re claiming."
Bozell later ranted, "What NBC has done is a direct threat to the democratic process and evidence of what conservatives have been saying all along. A network that purports to hold itself up as an objective news source while at the same time attempts to fix an election has lost all credibility. NBC must take responsibility, apologize to Donald Trump, and fire whoever was behind the strategic release of this tape."
Graham has never complained about the manufacted October-surprise aspect of the Hunter Biden, despite the fact that it had been floating around right-wing circles for over a year before the Post agreed to publish it. Graham and Bozell will not be calling for the New York Post to take responsibility, apologize to the Bidens and fire whoever was involved in the reporting of the story (though the lead reporter was embararassed enough by the story that he wouldn't put his byline on it).
Graham is nothing but a rank hypocrite. He will always give right-wing media a pass on things he attacks the "liberal media" for doing.
