Topic: Media Research Center
In between pushing the baseless narrative that "woke" policies caused Silicon Valley Bank to fail and fervently hoping the failure would have tanked the economy so Biden would be blamed for it and thus lose the 2024 presidential election, the Media Research Center found time to whine some more about fact-checkers. Tim Graham spent a March 24 post complaining that the Associated Press busted it for spreading the false narrative of "wokeness" being the downfall of these banks by posting an earlier clip of Bernie Marcus making the claim:
Beware those “independent fact-checkers” when they throw the allegation “Missing context.” This can translate as: “not enough liberal context.”
We discovered this on our own Facebook page, which was flagged for "Missing context" on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank:
But when we clicked on “See why,” it wasn’t a defense of their fractured SVB “context-checking.” It was a generic "Help" page.
[...]
So a lame "missing context" flag impairs our ability to share a conservative message. Bernie Marcus isn't even mentioned in the actual AP "Fact Check" article.
The rest of the post is a back-and-forth between the MRC and AP in which the MRC did not back up Marcus' claims about wokeness killing the bank -- only that Marcus was expressing an opinion, and that "Mr Marcus is a highly successful businessman and is entitled to share an opinion on this." But even a "highly successful businessman" should not be immune from having to back up what he says and from being called out when there's no evidence to support the claims he makes -- and the MRC has a responsibility to not repeat false claims merely because they fit a partisan narrative. Rather than behaving responsibly, Graham played the victim: "It's downright comical that AP would explicitly write us that 'missing context' means 'no liberal opinion included.' AP and other liberal outlets leave out any conservative rebuttal in 'news' stories on a daily basis."
If Graham doesn't want to be fact-checked, he and the MRC should stop spreading false and misleading things.
