Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center did a lot of ranting about Donald Trump's impending (and then actual) indictment and the district attorney who charged him. When the day of Trump's arraignment came on April 4, the ranting ramped up. Curtis Houck hit all the required talking points -- Bragg-bashing, Biden whataboutism -- in complaining about that a former president facing a criminal indictment is somehow consindered newsworthy:
Since Thursday evening, the media profession somehow found a way to even further embarrass itself by taking a steroids-induced trip back to 2015 and 2016 with wall-to-wall Trump coverage in light of his indictment by Soros-backed Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg on charges related to the infamous 2016 payments to Stormy Daniels.
As such, a litany of stories that have significant bearing on the country have been ignored and one story has been reporting that the Chinese spy balloon did, in fact, gather intelligence on some of our country’s most sensitive military installations. ABC and CBS have shown zero interest in highlighting this, ignoring it on their flagship Monday evening and Tuesday morning news shows.
Tim Graham whined that NPR was committing the offense of covering news, with an added fit of Hunter Biden Derangement Syndrome:
On Monday night's All Things Considered newscast, co-host Mary Louise Kelly covered the indictment of Trump as a serious conundrum for the media. She was pandering to the leftist audience, angered that Trump will probably get away with all this again, that he's just milking this indictment for fame and fortune and another Republican nomination for president. Kelly brought on NPR vice president and executive editor Terence Samuel to think out loud about how the coverage might disappoint the audience.
Samuel promised they would "flood the zone," as they say. "And what we have now is we have two reporters in the courtroom. We have two reporters outside the courtroom because the world is completely different now, and we will have to update that story as it's happening online in our newscast....It is constant and ongoing. We want to be authoritative. We want to be complete. And we're going to be relentless."
Now for conservative critics of NPR, Terence Samuel is infamous for proclaiming in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop was "not really" a story, a "pure distraction" that NPR shouldn't cover. They never wanted to be "complete" on that subject. None of that came up in this conversation, obviously.
When commentators on a couple of networks raised questions about the charges against Trump -- despite the fact that all the evidence has not been made public -- Kevin Tober spun: "You know the charges against former President Donald Trump by the corrupt Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg are in trouble when even ABC and NBC are skeptical about their legal standing. ... The case is in serious jeopardy if this is the way two of the three liberal broadcast networks are covering these charges against Trump." Tober returned later to defend Trump and inject the "Soros-backed" talking point:
During MSNBC’s special live coverage of former President Donald Trump’s speech where he gave his initial reaction to the Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charging him with 34 counts of falsifying business records, co-host Stephanie Ruhle had a diva-like tantrum over Trump daring to fundraise off the controversy. Ruhle should check her emails because this writer has received dozens of fundraising emails from Democrats since Trump’s indictment Tuesday.
Ruhle has no problem with being a hypocrite. Instead, she lashed out at Republicans for claiming this ordeal was good for Trump: “right-wing media has been saying scandal after scandal this is great for Trump. It is never great for Trump politically.”
“It's a win-in-one-place and one-place-only: fundraising,” Ruhle claimed. She then went into meltdown mode over how Trump has solicited donations:
[...]
No understanding the difference between a grift and fundraising for a presidential campaign. Ruhle cried that for Trump “this is always about the grift and fundraising.”
Why can't it be both? Tober didn't ask that question.
Houck came back to have a fit of CNN Derangement Syndrome:
Call it their Super Bowl, the greatest day of their lives, or the pinnacle of their careers. Either way, CNN went wall-to-wall Tuesday with coverage of former President Trump’s arrest and arraignment on charges by far-left, Soros-backed Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg in relation to payments made to Stormy Daniels. and, as such, CNN’s coverage showed a network relapsing back to its Trump-centric days of 2015 and 2016 with imbecilic hot takes masquerading as expert analysis.
NewsBusters suffered through Tuesday afternoon so you didn’t have to and below represents ten moments (in chronological order) from the embarrassing display of CNN’s non-existent status as a news organization.
CNN is "non-existent" as a news organization? Doesn't that description more accurately apply to Fox News, which actually lied to its viewers about election fraud?
Ther MRC's coverage on April 5 started with a post from Mark Finkelstein cheering that "the former lead prosecutor of Robert Mueller's Russia-Russia-Russia investigation of Trump" raised questions about Trump's prosecution despite the fact that, again, not all of the evidence has been made public. Clay Waters complained that right-wing attacks on Bragg and his prosecution were called out, complete with 25-year-old whataboutism and an upgraded smeaer of Soros to an "international billionaire":
National Public Radio’s media reporter David Folkenflik, who has been on an anti-Fox News kick of late, went off on “right-wing media’s” “apocalyptic” coverage criticizing the legal case against Donald Trump and their attacks on Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who has brought charges against Trump involving payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels.
Earlier, Trump and his conservative defenders were baselessly accused on Friday’s PBS NewsHour of both racism (Bragg is black) and anti-Semitism (for accurately pointing out Bragg’s campaign for district attorney was funded by left-wing international billionaire George Soros).
[...]
Left out of these agitated takedowns were any sense of historical context – such as when media outlets like NPR and PBS went “apocalyptic” and “extreme” in defense of Democratic president Bill Clinton when he was supposedly persecuted by special counsel Kenneth Starr for lying under oath about his own hushing up of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Go here for a taste of the way the press reacted to Starr’s attempt to follow the rule of law in pursuit of a president accused of sexual misconduct. It’s safe to say Alvin Bragg won’t be getting the Starr treatment.
The MRC continued to write up any little thing that could be considered to be pro-Trump:
- CNN’s Panelists Dismayed, ‘Distressed’ By Weak Trump Indictment
- Musk Mocks Baseless Trump Indictment in Meme, Calls Out Soros-Tied DA
- Joe Scarborough: 'Every Dem Disappointed By Indictment'—So Let's Jail Trump For Contempt!
Graham summed up the day's bias in his podcast (bolding his):
The media's Trump obsession overflowed on Arraignment Day in New York City. They loved analyzing Trump's grumpiness in photographs taken in the court room, but they didn't love the substance of the actual indictment once it was widely released. The legal analysts expressed concerns that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg didn't explain how misdemeanors could be promoted into felony counts, and there could be problems with the statute of limitations.
NewsBusters Associate Editor Nick Fondacaro joins the show to discuss all the video tweets we put out to analyze the events. At first, analysts like CNN's Jamie Gangel were excited to note from photographs that Trump looks like "he's in custody. He's in their control. I think this is very striking." But then lawyers who hate Trump -- like his former appointee John Bolton -- announced on CNN "I'm extraordinarly distressed by this document...This is even weaker than I feared it would be."
It was especially funny when Rachel Maddow announced MSNBC would be running no live coverage of Trump's speech in Florida, because it's the usual routine of "lies" and "grievances" about his "perceived enemies" (like he has none). But then she says MSNBC is such a serious news network: "there's a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things."
Needless to say, Graham didn't mention that he didn't really didn't want to talk about the fact that Fox News had been recently exposed as knowingly broadcasting untrue things to its viewers.
