Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves targeting journalist -- and it loves even more when Fox News' Tucker Carlson does so too, to the point that Carlson's viewers send the journalists death threats, as New York Times writer Taylor Lorenz has learned. Another target of both MRC and Carlson has been NBC tech reporter Brandy Zadrozny.
Last September, the MRC's Alex Christy complained that Zadrozny "trash[ed] Facebook for not being bossy enough with its stupider (i.e. conservative) consumers" by pointing out that its policy to stop election ads a week before the election was meaningless, huffing in response: "Nobody in this conversation acknowledged that candidates have been airing controversial ads on television for decades, and no one needed a moderator like Facebook to rule one side was airing 'disinformation.' That was hashed out by the opposing candidates."
Then, in an April 9 post, Alexander Hall whined:
NBC investigative reporter Brandy Zadrozny is one of the internet's most famous Cancel Vulture journalists ruining the lives of everyday Americans. She blasted Fox News and right-wing commentators in an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab.
On Thursday, Zadrozny was introduced by Nieman Lab writer Brad Esposito in an interview as a “librarian turned reporter,” and she indeed has no qualms about nagging Americans to hush. While Zadrozny claimed that “[t]here’s so few monsters in the world,” she said she has “never felt so secure in my critique of a place” as calling Fox News “trash.” She mentioned “Fox” seven times during the interview.
One segment that oddly enraged her was when former Fox News host Eric Bolling used “doughnuts” to explain the crisis of America’s national deficit= under then-President Barack Obama. “That was actually an Eric Bolling segment that actually aired and I remember just screaming at the TV — like, we had all of these TVs, and I was like, nooooooooooo. So a lot of screaming.”
What apparently doesn’t outrage Zadrozny though? Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters, it seems.
Despite a history of reporting on extremism on social media platforms, Zadrozny only mentioned Antifa in the context of paranoia by certain “Facebook groups.” She also merely described Black Lives Matter protestors as people “saying the names of Black men and women who were killed for no reason.” Meanwhile, she described white counter demonstrators, who likely came to prevent the destruction of the local area, as an “army of white people [in fatigues] with huge guns everywhere.”
Esposito brought up the January 6 Capitol riot. Neither Esposito nor Zadrozny mentioned the Black Lives Matter riots that destroyed property in multiple cities including $500 million in damages in Minneapolis alone, according to Fox News. The two journalists also failed to mention the more recent Capitol attack where an aspiring Nation of Islam member reportedly attacked multiple police officers, resulting in the death of one officer and himself.
Hall didn't mention that Bolling's doughnut-deficit analogy did not reflect reality (or why he's a former Fox News host). Nor did Hall explain why he does not find the Capitol riot offensive. He then touted how the right-wing website Revolver News described Zadrozny as "The Woman In Charge of Doxxing and Destroying Trump Supporters" (no comment on the underhanded methods of the right-wing Project Veritas for comparison).
Then, it was Carlson's turn to target Zadrozny, citing the Revolver News report and having one of the writers of that story, Darren Beattie, on to talk about it. No mention that Beattie got fired from the Trump White House for hanging out with white nationalists.NBC responded by stating that Carlson's "smear" of Zadrozny "ha[s] shamefully encouraged harassment and worse."
After that the Washington Post did an article on how Carlson targets journalists, prompitng Tim Graham to complain:
Friday’s Washington Post splashed a big headline on the front of the Style section with a picture of number-one Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the words “The bully pundit: Fox News host Tucker Carlson often launches attacks on journalists. And once he’s off the air, the zealots who follow him start lobbing hate tweets and death threats.”
Radio host Chris Plante made fun on his Friday morning radio show with the obvious point: So it’s dangerous to launch attacks on journalists, but what is this story but a 43-paragraph attack on a journalist? Apparently, no Fox News host can be identified as a journalist. The Washington Post implies conservatives are propagandists, not journalists.
This is just the latest in a pile of stories campaigning for Carlson to be canceled by Fox.
Wait -- Graham thinks Carlson is a "journalist"? And that right-wingers like himself and Carlson are not propagandists? They both get paid quite well to push propaganda. And if Carlson is not an effective propagndist -- er, journalist, why is he and the MRC so concerned that Carlson is being held accountable for what he says and obsessing about what the Post is saying about him?
Graham then decided to wilidly read into the Post reproducing Fox News' defense of Carlson as "legitimate criticism": "They printed that like it was hate speech, like it was offensive. This is a common liberal-media tactic: disparaging conservative media criticism by saying it only encouraged violent Twitter trolls. CNN commonly claimed any attempt to criticize them or chant 'CNN sucks' at Trump rallies encouraged violence against journalists." Graham gets paid well to disparage any legitimate criticism of conservative media.
Graham then complained of the "threatened liberal journalists" listed in the article, including Zadrozny and Lorenz who got death threats as a result of Carlson's targeting, then whined: "So getting a Twitter death threat is serious, but a mob outside your home is just a 'boisterous protest'? Was it 'mostly peaceful'? His wife called the cops." Graham forgot the part about Carlson lying that his front door was damaged by the protesters, suggesting that calling the cops may have been an overreaction -- or was done so right-wing defenders like Graham could attack the protesters as more dangerous than they actually were.
Graham concluded by huffing: "The point of this article is that Fox News is a menacing threat, not a news network. It's as anti-Fox as a Brian Stelter rant at CNN."? Stelter, of course, is another MRC (and Fox News) target.
