Topic: Media Research Center
As is his wont, the Media Research Center's Alexander Hall spent a Feb. 4 post complaining about fact-checkers and their attempts to push for a more factual discourse:
There is no greater or more ironic threat to free speech than liberal journalists and fact-checkers. PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Angie Drobnic Holan’s piece for Poynter is a great example.
“We’ve entered an intense period where false words are inspiring violent deeds,” Holan exclaimed in the opening remarks of her piece condemning free speech. “Opinion: To control online misinformation, we need real-world solutions,” published Feb. 2 expressed repeated outrage over conservatives questioning the 2020 election and the Capitol riot. Holan’s righteous condemnations conspicuously ignored mentioning this past summer of left-wing terror and years of the phony leftist Russia collusion narrative. She went on to call for a solution for misinformation from “every sector of society,” particularly “from technology companies and government.”
Her prescription for this crisis of truth, in true left-wing fashion, was to purge speech. Her first suggestion was for Big Tech companies to “be more consistent in their penalties for spreading misinformation.” Being “consistent” here was not about restricting left-wing conspiracy theories. Her goal was to restrict the speech of anti-establishment “politicians and candidates” with the same penalties used on a common citizen.
Of course, if Hall had bothered to read the Mueller report, he would have found that "leftist Russia collusion narrative" was not "phony," it simply didn't rise to a prosecutable level. He also seems to have forgotten that "conservatives questioning the 2020 election" is one of the things that instigated the Capitol riot. And, of course, "left-wing terror" is just a Trumpian code word used to push the right-wing narrative that all racial justice protesters are violent.
Hall went on to devote a paragraph of alleged "Antifa" and "Black Livews Matter" crimes (while refusing to acknowldging the crimes of his fellow right-wingers at the Capitol riot). On example he gave: "Tucker Carlson claimed that Smash Racism DC had '[broken] his oak door and one person mentioned a pipe bomb, as heard on a security video,' USA Today summarized." Funny how the supposely irredeemably "liberal media" outlet USA Today is suddenly credible when it's uncritically quoting a conservative, eh?
Just one problem with that story, though: There's no evidence that Carlson's door was damaged duyring the protest at his house. As we documented the last time the MRC pushed this story, Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple actually went to Carlson's house after the attack and found that the front door "appeared to be in working condition," and that a person he talked to at the house offered no evidence of damage. A week later, Wemple pointed out again that the door "seemed sturdy and fully intact. A woman who answered a knock looked it up and down and appeared to conclude it was in fine shape," and the police report on the incident mentioned no damage to the front door. Protesters also agreed that nobody in their number damaged the door.
But Hall was simply not into reporting facts, even when criticizing a fact-checker. He went into guilt-by-association mode, declaring that "The Poynter Institute has gained well over a million in donations from liberal megadonors such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) and The Omidyar Network in the past." Which has nothing to do with anything, especially if he can't be bothered to get his own facts straight.
