Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center executive Tim Graham has spent the past four years complaining that President trump was fact-checked by the media. Now that Trump is out of office, Graham turned his whining to whataboutism in a Jan. 23 post grumbling that the fact-checkers at the Washington Post won't at this time do a running tally of President Biden's falsehoods the way it did for prolifit liar Trump:
Glenn Kessler and his Washington Post “Fact Checker” squad celebrated their end-of-term count of President Trump’s “false and misleading statements” – 30,573. Their level of aggression clearly increased as the term went on, since they announced on January 21, 2019 they had arrived at 8,158 of those – or 26.7 percent of the four-year total.
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But party affiliation matters: there was no False & Misleading Statements count for Barack Obama, and there wouldn't have been one if Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Kessler told Jordan Klepper at Comedy Central "In terms of fact checking, Hillary Clinton is like playing chess with a real pro. Fact-checking Donald Trump is like playing checkers [Laughter] with someone that's not very good at it. It's pretty boring." Klepper shot back: "You find Donald Trump boring." Kessler replied: "Yes! His facts are so easily disproven, there's no joy in the hunt."
There is no "hunt" for Democrats. Only admiration for those chess pros!
Needless to say, Graham offered no evidence that Obama, Hillary or Biden have ever told falsehoods at the same rate as Trump, whom Graham has previously handwaved as merely having "a casual relationship with the truth." Graham then got mad that the Biden White House quickly responded to the Post's questions about evidence to back up the claims it has made:
On January 15, Kessler signaled his new approach in fact-checking Biden's address on the coronavirus. He boasted that Biden's team responded to him immediately. That's because Democrats care about their home-team newspapers, and Biden's team knew he would be sympathetic.
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Kessler warmly accepted Biden's use of liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and poverty analysts at Columbia University backed by liberal foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But when Trump used the National Federation of Independent Business for a survey of small business confidence in 2018, Kessler dismissed it as a "conservative group" whose survey didn't draw enough responses to impress him. "Misleading"!
Oddly, Graham seemed to think it was OK that the Trump White House had little interest in proving what they said was true.
