Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center looks for any excuse to attack non-right-wing media outlet -- even when they do the responsible thing and delete tweets that contain incorrect information. Curtis HOuck lashed out in a May 24 post:
On Monday night, The Washington Post posted a tweet asking its left-wing audience to share how the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 affected their lives and “what has — or hasn’t changed” in regards to policing, protests, and other far-left priorities. Besides the eye-roll-inducing premise, there was one problem with this part of the tweet: “George Floyd was shot and killed in police custody.”
The tweet remained up for a few minutes before being deleted and replaced with this esoteric and wimpy excuse: “We’ve deleted a previous tweet for this form that included language that was changed after publish.”
Misspellings, mistakes, and typos happen. We all make them. But it was quite the mistake considering the submission page had the same error in a short blurb before the blank space for readers to weigh in: “On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was shot and killed in police custody. His death sparked outrage, wide scale [sic] protests and calls to change policing. Two years later, what has — or hasn’t changed?”
If everyone makes errors, it makes no sense for Houck to lash out at the Post for making one -- unless the goal is to attack the existence of said outlet.
Kevin Tober did something similar in a June 30 post:
On Thursday afternoon, ABC's Good Morning America (GMA) tweeted a video of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson being sworn in to replace the now-retired Stephen Breyer with the obviously false caption claiming "Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in as the first Black Supreme Court justice in U.S. history." This is despite the fact that not only is she the third black justice (behind Thurgood Marshall & Clarence Thomas), but she is now serving alongside Justice Thomas.
The tweet remained up for almost five hours before the backlash and ridicule online became so much that GMA was forced to take it down.
GMA's apparent ignorance of basic Supreme Court history wasn't just relegated to Twitter. The same video and caption were also posted to GMA's YouTube page before changing the video title and caption shortly after they deleted the tweet.
To make matters worse, both the Twitter video and YouTube video were monetized meaning the network made money from it and there were companies who ran ads that viewers had to watch before playing the video (see the end of the blog for the list).
Tober gave the game away by then hyping how "GMA got absolutely roasted on Twitter for this epic failure of a tweet," then sneering that "maybe if Good Morning America spent less time being corporate whores for their parent company Disney constantly, they would pay more attention to these little details about the makeup of the Supreme Court." That's a reference to its hypocritical attacks on ABC for promoing Disney content despite the fact that the MRC uses its own "news" division, CNSNews.com, to promote MRC initiatives and narratives.
You will not be surprised to learn that, by contrast, the MRC won't highlight the deletion of erroneous tweets by its own employees and operations. For instance, MRC chief Brent Bozell issued aMay 10 tweet stating, "Agree with @elonmusk that the Trump ban "was morally wrong and flat-out stupid. Twitter knew that, but they did it anyway to interfere with the 2020 presidential election." As the Washingotn Post's David Weigel pointed out, Trump wasn't banned from Twitter until Jan. 9, 2021 -- more than two months after the election. Bozell quietly deleted the tweet and wrote a replacement one, and his employees censored any reference to it, let alone criticized him for spreading false information.
