Topic: Media Research Center
There's a boatload of misinformation in a June 28 Media Research Center post, in which Alexander Hall inexplicably continues to defend hateful right-wing ranter Steven Crowder, under the headline "China Strikes":
TikTok can be subservient to the genocidal Chinese government, but the platform’s real offense was allowing conservative commentators, a leftist organization said.
“Comedian and conservative commentator Steven Crowder has been banned from China’s TikTok viral video platform,” Reclaim The Net reported June 26. Leftist organization Media Matters proclaimed it was behind the purge: “Far-right internet personality Steven Crowder has been banned from TikTok following a June 8 Media Matters report highlighting his bigotry on the platform,” the organization wrote in a June 24 update. “A TikTok spokesperson confirmed to Media Matters that Crowder’s account had been removed for violating its community guidelines.”
Media Matters leadership has received extensive funding from leftist megadonor George Soros, the record shows. Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society (OSF) tax forms has shown five separate donations between 2010 and 2014 totalling $1,575,000. Soros gave the organization money every other year during that time. The leftist group released a report earlier in June sliming Crowder for “using TikTok to spread hate to a younger audience.”
First: Hall offers no evidence that the Chinese government even knows Crowder exists, let alone that it ordered TikTok to remove him from the platform, as he suggests -- or, for that matter, that the Chinese government is so involved in TikTok that it polices all users or eve the those in America.
Second: Hall's complaint about Media Matters receiving funding from Soros interests is a red herring. He offers no evidence that any of it was used to target Crowder -- highly unlikely, since even its own documents notes that the last bit of Soros funding came in 2014. It's also a pittance compared to the money the MRC receives from rich conservatives like the Mercers.
In addition to claiming that Media Matters "slim[ed]" Crowder, Hall also asserted that it "spread fearmongering rhetoric about Crowder’s popularity" ... by pointing out his record of hateful rhetoric. Hall did not prove anything Media Matters said about Crowder to be false or misleading. Hall also laughably claimed that noting TikTok's "young user base" meant that "Media Matters may have also revealed the main reason why liberals are terrified of conservative commentators accessing platforms like TikTok to spread right-wing humor." The MRC likes to portray what Crowder does as "humor" -- giving him the comedian defense it won't offer to those whose sense of humor is farther to the left -- but offers no evidence that any of it is funny.
Indeed, Hall didn't quote anything from Crowder Media Matters found offensive -- just like it didn't directly quote the nastiness that got Crowder suspended from YouTube in May.
Crowder's TikTok suspension also made the June roundup of what the MRC claims is the "WORST censorship"; Casey Ryan laughably called Media Matters an "extreme far-left organization" and repeated Hall's complaint that it "spread fearmongering rhetoric about Crowder’s popularity."
It's just another reminder that Media Matters lives rent-free inside the collective heads of the MRC -- perhaps because it does its job more effectively than the MRC does.
