Topic: Media Research Center
We've been documenting how the Media Research Center hyped the right-wing narrative over John Durham's filing dubously suggesting that the Hillary Clinton campaign was spying on Donald Trump, but there's one key narrative manufacturer we haven't covered yet: MRC executive Tim Graham, who pushed the narrative in his own unique way.
For his Feb. 14 podcast, Graham repeated the MRC's whining over non-right-wing not immediately covering the Durham filing, huffing in the preview: "Fox News analysts suggested this was "worse than Watergate," but the liberal networks only use this kind of promotional phrasing for Republican scandals, like for Trump or George W. Bush." On the podcast itself, Graham touted how Fox News jumped on it, when whined that it was being portrayed as "a Fox News story. That's their way of dismissing it andsaying they don't have to do it." Graham then cheered that "Durham's enough of a pro that his team is not loaded with a bunch of liberal partisans who then can leak hourly to other liberal partisans at MSNBC or CNN or the New York Times or the Washington Post -- you know, the quote-unquote objective medla seeking the quote-unquote truth." Graham didn't admit that Durham seems to have right-wing partisans apparently leaking to their fellow-right-wing partisans at Fox News, et al. Then, as if to prove this unspoken point, he ran a clip of Mollie Hemingway ranting about it at Fox News -- neither or whom he identifies as the partisan conservatives they are.
Graham than played the worse-than-Watergate card: "Worse than Watergate has gotten to be a cliche , to the point where you wonder whether Watergate was overpushed to begin with, as Mollie suggested. That was definitely dirty pool, but yes, if you compare 'Oh, we broke into the DNC headquarters once,' that's dirty. So is spying on the president or looking at his internet usage. That's dirty pool too,but apparently the media only cares about one party committing the dirty pool."
Actually, there's no evidence that any of the alleged spying happened while Trump was president, but who ever said Graham cared about the facts when those facts conflict with right-wing narratives?
Graham went on to rant that the Mueller report was "war." Discounting the Mueller report is, of course, another right-wing narrative.
Graham rehashed a lot of this for his Feb. 16 column, whining that "While the networks spent more than 2,600-plus minutes on the Trump-Russia narrative, they’ve done next to nothing on Durham. ... To the media elite, Durham’s probe is only useful to the 'right-wing media wormhole.' Facts don’t come first. The truth isn’t more important than ever." Graham lives in the "right-wing media wormhole," so it's a bit rich to hear him complaining about the label -- and he's certainly not going to admit that what he's serving up is a narrative as well. He rehashed all this again in his Feb. 16 podcast.
Graham used a Feb. 17 post to whining that CNN's Brian Stelter accurately called out the attempt by the right-wing media -- including the MRC -- to aggressively hype the Durham filing:
When the liberal media aren't ignoring the John Durham probe, they're "reporting" on it by suggesting it's the newest pile of overwrought MAGA propaganda. CNN's covering it by letting Brian Stelter cry "HOAX" at Fox News and other conservative outlets.
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Stelter summarized his own dismissive analysis in his "Reliable Sources" newsletter. The use of bold type below is Stelter's, not mine.
I felt compelled to write about it, too, because the actual court filing at issue is much less newsworthy than the explosion of false claims that have ricocheted from it. Here are the takeaways from a media phenomenon POV:
Translation: Pay no attention to the Special Counsel behind the curtain! CNN spent years promoting every tissue of gossip around the Robert Mueller investigation. They willed a scandal into existence -- collusion between Trump and the Russians -- that Mueller ultimately couldn't prove. But:
>> It seemed like Donald Trump's media allies tried to "will" a scandal into existence. The talk had a snake-eating-its-own-tail quality. But it worked.
Yes, CNN is lecturing about cable coverage having a "snake eating its own tail quality. This, from the network with 77 stories gossiping about nonexistent "pee tapes." Stelter still insisted "journalistic analysis" isn't what conservatives are doing.
>> The ideological outlets that blew the filing way out of proportion weren't incentivized to apply journalistic analysis to the filing. They were incentivized to do the opposite.
Here is the usual CNN bluster about how Fox News is an ideological outlet....and CNN is not.
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>> Before reporters from normal news outlets could even dig into the filing, Fox's abnormal operation screamed "MEDIA IGNORES DURHAM BOMBSHELL." Later fact-checks were cast as part of a media coverup.
We're still waiting for ABC, CBS, and NBC to touch the Durham filing on television. The minute count on CNN and MSNBC is...minute. And yes, "fact checks" and "explainers" are actually "explain away-ers."
At no point does Graham refute anything Stelter says -- he just plays whataboutism. And on top of that, he effectively confirms that right-wing media have created the narrative of how the media won't cover the Durham story to the MRC's satisfaction.
Graham spent his Feb. 18 column pretending to be aghast that right-wing media claims about the Durham filing were being fact-checked and found wanting, and that fact-checking somehow proves what a "threat" Durham is:
This is the threat that Durham represents. He is exposing that everything the Clinton campaign did here was to politicize national-security agencies, sharing their smears with the FBI and the CIA to spur spying on Trump advisers, to inflame media coverage, and then to taint the judicial process through the Mueller team, where 11 of 16 prosecutors were Democrat donors. Five of them were Hillary donors.
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A similar spin came from taxpayer-subsidized NPR, under their internet headline “The John Durham filing that set off conservative media, explained.” Their online summary of the All Things Considered story blatantly editoralized “The political right is making hay out of a recent filing in special counsel John Durham's investigation into the Trump-Russia probe. We break down the truth behind their outlandish claims.”
Outlandish? Fill-in host Elissa Nadworny asserted “Fox News even said Clinton had, quote, ‘infiltrated Trump Tower and the White House.’ But is that what Durham actually said?”
Reporter Ryan Lucas replied: “No. Durham never said in his filing that Clinton paid operatives to spy on Trump or his campaign. He never used the word infiltrate.” All this parsing sounds like saying Bill Clinton never had “sex” with Monica Lewinsky, since he claimed it was all oral sex.
Nadworny implied this was ancient history: “So all of this is tied up in events that happened five or six years ago. Why does it matter now?” Lucas explained “Trump had hoped that Durham would deliver a report before the 2020 election that could help Trump's campaign. That, of course, didn't happen. But the battle over shaping perceptions is still very much raging.”
NPR is aggressively “shaping perceptions” that conservative media manufacture "outlandish" claims that mangle the truth.
Again, Graham doesn't prove any of this fact-checking wrong, nor does he admit that his fellow right-wing media denizens deviated from the facts in overhyping the story. His goal is to progray the "liberal media" as evil and the right-wing media as victims.
Similarly, a Feb. 18 post by Graham complained that fact-checkers pointed out the holes in the right-wing media narrative on Durham, again mostly by playing whatboutism:
The "independent fact checkers" really wanted to downplay anything John Durham was saying about lawyers for the Clinton campaign snooping around in the Trump team's internet activities. They seized on words that Fox News used that sounded like active verbs meant to sell a story -- in this case, that Team Clinton paid to "infiltrate" the Trump orbit.
First there's Dean Miller at Lead Stories, a website that Facebook uses to warn users of "misinformation."
Fact Check: Special Counsel Did NOT Say Clinton Paid Tech Boss To 'Infiltrate' Trump Tower And White House Servers
This on some level assumes that liberal media outlets never used more colorful words to describe Mueller findings. They have an energetic tendency to check the hype in conservative media articles, not liberal media articles.
Yet again, Graham does not disprove the fact-checks; he whines about "nitpick[ing]" and complains about "misleading words in headlines" being singled out.
Graham devoted yet another podcast to the Durham filing on Feb. 18, this time focused on Vanity Fair covering the other side of the story by -- gasp! -- talking to Hillary Clinton, whining in the writeup: "Hillary and her glossy-magazine enablers don't want anyone to focus on how desperately they tried to tie Trump to Russia both during the election and then afterward." Given that the Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian operatives and his onetime campaign manager had contacts with a Russian spy, it wasn't very difficult -- or counterfactual -- to do.
Graham was still at it in a Feb. 20 post, trying to spin away Durham's own statement trying to decouple himself from media coverage of his filing:
Liberal journalists on Friday rallied around a New York Times article by Charlie Savage titled "Durham Distances Himself From Furor in Right-Wing Media Over Filing."
Like a good Democrat, Savage spun that Durham "distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers."
But Savage story quoted Durham, and his actual argument said something different, distancing himself from anyone overstating or understating his filing:
Of course, Durham is still distancing himself from right-wing overhype.He then rehashed claims about the filing from right-wing activist Andrew McCarthy, whose partisan leanings Graham did not disclose. He concluded with one last bit of whataboutism: "The Times really thinks they didn't run "blaring outrage" and "grievance-stroking headlines" about Trump?"
Meanwhile, Graham really thinks all the whataboutism he has been spewing is distracting people from the fact that he's trying to cover up for getting the story wrong in order to manufacture a narrative. That's the state of "media research" at the MRC these days.
