Topic: Media Research Center
When Trump administration official Miles Taylor came forward in 2020 as the author of an anonymous article (and later book) stating how he was part of a group in the White House keeping President Trump from acting on his worst instincts, the Media Research Center lashed out, dismissing him as merely a low-level staffer (he was actually a Cabinet secretary's deupty chief of staff, hardly the low-level flunkie" the MRC insisted he was) who did it for the money -- while failing to prove anything Taylor said was false.
The MRC has continued to bash Taylor whever he appears on TV to talk about Republican extremism. We noted that in September, when Taylor defended Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Mark Milley from Republican accusastions of treason when it was revealed that he secretly contacted Chinese officials to assure them that the U.S. wouldn't attack amid Trump's increasingly unstable behavior after losing the 2020 presidential election, Mark Finkelstein sneered that "There's something of the callow youth about the 33-year-old Taylor."
When Taylor appeared on TV again to call out Republicans' disturbingly casual attitude toward the COVID pandemic, Finkelstein returned to have a Miles meltdown in a Nov. 30 post:
Miles Taylor is one of those Trump-loathing "Republicans" that the liberal media likes to trot out. The sort that can be relied upon to take shots at their supposed fellow party members.
Taylor's the guy who, as "Anonymous," in 2018 wrote an op-ed for the New York Times vaingloriously describing himself as part of the anti-Trump "resistance" inside the White House. At the time, the Times billed Taylor as a "senior" official in the Trump administration. But when the curtain was pulled back, Taylor was revealed to have been at the time of writing the op-ed nothing more than a mere deputy chief of staff at DHS: a " low-level flunkie," as our former colleague Rich Noyes put it.
This was elevated into a book deal as well -- ka-ching. There's gold in those Trump-bashing hills.
As if Finkelstein wasn't getting paid for writing this tirade. Maybe he's jealous that nobody will give him a book deal.
After noting in passing that Taylor dismissed a Republican congressman and claimed that "Republicans are quite literally murdering their base of support with their disinformation," Finkelstein didn't even respond to it -- a clue that he knows the statement is true, no matter how much he complains that it was said. Instead, he continued to spew personal attacks against Taylor:
Various questions arise around Taylor's truthfulness. Although he describes himself as a Republican, Taylor has admitted to having supported and donated to Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign.
And remember, Obama wasn't running against one of those scary, far-right Republicans. His opponent was John McCain. If you ditched McCain to support Obama—the man with the most liberal voting record in the Senate—it's fair to say you ain't no Republican. Question: if McCain wasn't good enough for Taylor, did he turn around and vote for Trump in 2016—or did he seek and accept a position in his administration under false pretenses?
And then there's the matter of Taylor having flat-out lied about his identity. When CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed him in 2020, Taylor, who at the time was a paid CNN contributor, denied being Anonymous. When the lie was revealed, CNN said that Taylor would nonetheless "remain a CNN contributor."
But Taylor doesn't mention a CNN affiliation in his Twitter profile, and in his LinkedIn profile, he describes himself as having been a CNN contributor in "2020, less than a year."
Sounds like CNN might have quietly dumped the mendacious Taylor. But the apparent CNN reject is still good enough for the likes of Nicolle Wallace and MSNBC . . . just so long as he's willing to reliably spew colorful anti-Republican attacks.
Perhaps Taylor's best bet would be to slink back into anonymity.
Nasty, partisan personal attacks are not "media research," but Finkelstein apparently thinks they are. And rants and insults are what the MRC has desended to these days.
