Topic: Media Research Center
After months of attacking Alvin Bragg, the district attorney who's behind Donald Trump's first indictment, as a "Soros-backed prosecutor," the Media Research Center is aghast that anyone who would point out that Aileen Cannon, who will oversee Trump's second indictment (which the MRC has been defending Trump against), was appointed to her position by Trump and might be biased toward him. Alex Christy whined in a June 9 post:
Gone are the days when questioning whether a judge in a Trump indictment case can be truly impartial is said to be unacceptable because the cast of MSNBC's Friday special coverage on the matter sounded the alarm whether Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon can truly be fair and neutral given some of her previous rulings.
Diaz-Balart presented the news to NBC senior executive editor for national security David Rohde and asked for his thoughts, “And now NBC can confirm indeed that Judge Aileen Cannon will be presiding over this case. Just thought, your reaction to that?”
Not thrilled with the news, Rohde declared that “I'm concerned and if she, you know, handles it through the trial she made some very unusual rulings in the course of the litigation surrounding the search warrant.”
Rohde is alluding to Cannon’s decision to appoint a special master back in September.
Christy didn't mention that legal experts questioned Cannon's movefor a special master, seen as a move designed to benefit Trump and which a federal appeals court later overruled.Christy pretended this wasn't evidence of bias: "Cannon was presented with an unprecedented and politically sensitive case involving a former president who is currently running again, she issued a ruling, it got reversed, that isn’t definitive proof of partiality.
P.J. Gladnick whined about the criticism in a June 11 post:
On Friday, MSNBC acted "concerned" over the news that Aileen Cannon was chosen as the judge to oversee the Trump documents case. However, the MSNBC reaction was mild compared to the sheer panic over Cannon in an article published by Slate magazine that same day. Mark Joseph Stern, Slate's senior writer on legal matters sounds like he will spend many sleepless nights over his extreme fear that "Judge Aileen Cannon Can Absolutely Sink the Federal Prosecution of Trump.
[...]
EEEK! And what gives Stern nightmares is that this case hasn't been assigned to a liberal judge who can be counted on to pressure the jury into the desirable outcome of convicting Trump.
[...]
GASP! She gave a decision favorable for Trump. Not permitted in a world where the federal government has largely been politically weaponized. You can't fight weaponizers! Stern notes Smith has the option of requesting a different judge, although "Trump would surely fight such a request, and it’s impossible to say where the 11th Circuit would come down."
It's not impossible to say where Mark Joseph Stern and his fellow media liberals would come down. And is there a Xanax bottle big enough to calm him down if Judge Cannon remains on the case?
Mark Finkelstein used a June 12 post to complain that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough questioned the odds that Cannon would end up with this case, but cheered that "both of Scarborough's expert guests—neither being in any way a Trump fan—shot down Joe's fevered fantasy."
Cassandra DeVries huffed the same day, with added Sonia Sotomayor whataboutism repeated for the MRCs defenses of Clarence Thomas:
During Monday’s CNN This Morning, host Erica Hill and senior legal analyst Elie Honig attempted to stigmatize and discredit Judge Aileen Cannon, who will preside over former President Trump’s indictment in the classified documents scandal. They doubted her ability to be impartial since Trump appointed her to the federal bench and discussed possible reasons for the Department of Justice to pressure her to recuse herself from the case.
[...]
While Honig concluded that there was not enough substance to recuse Cannon, Hill and Honig repeatedly highlighted her appointment by Trump, clerkship for a conservative judge, age, and previous rulings to undermine her credibility. They openly discussed reasons she might not be fit to preside and implied she should recuse herself because of her conservative ties. However, CNN did not have a problem with liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor refusing to recuse herself from a case directly involving the publisher of her book. Once again, CNN evaluated conservatives with hasher standards.
Peter Kotara spent a June 15 post whining that Scarborough criticized Cannon again:
Seething MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Thursday’s Morning Joediscovered that there was in fact, no limit to the depths he would dig to smear Judge Aileen Cannon, who will be presiding over former President Trump’s criminal trial. Putting aside how Trump had appointed her to the bench, the gist of Scarborough’s criticism was that she was too young and too dumb, thus she couldn’t be trusted to oversee the trial.
Scarborough’s vendetta against Judge Cannon, one that was shared by the rest of the liberal media, stemmed from the fact that she made a prior ruling in the case that favored Trump, and was overturned by the Federal 11th Circuit Court. This case was the media’s chance to “get Trump” before the election, and they couldn’t stand the fact Trump didn’t get a hostile, left-leaning judge.
[...]
Their absurd argument was that because she hasn’t been a judge as long as some other judges have, she cannot run the trial. Scarborough even admitted that Judge Cannon being selected for the case was “assigned randomly,” which was standard procedure in the courts. Her being on the case was just a normal part of the way the judiciary system works, an impartial process, but it wasn’t enough.
Kotara concluded: "For someone who claimed to support the justice system in America and that Trump’s guilt was certain, Scarborough should stop crying that the dice didn’t roll his way and let the trial play out." We don't recall anyone from the MRC saying that about Bragg.
Christy returned to complain some more in a June 16 post:
MSNBC spent 93 percent of Tuesday discussing former President Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday and it appears some at the network think that number is too low. One of those voices belongs to contributor, professor, and former Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who joined Thursday’s edition of The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle to demand that Judge Aileen Cannon work with Chief Justice John Roberts to televise the trial.
His remarks also come as the network tries its hardest to discredit Cannon by doubting her ability to be impartial, so not only is MSNBC demanding the judge rule certain ways, but also that she consider their programming demands, “To me, the most important order, Steph, that she should be issuing is a request to the Chief Justice of the United States to get this televised.”
Christy then demanded that the media not turn a Trump trial into a circus, even though Trump is the one who would likely be responsible for doing that:
Katyal isn’t wrong to say this case will be “one of the most important” in the nation’s history, which is why it must be taken seriously and not turned into a sports-like spectacle with networks mashing together montages of the most “dramatic” moments to recap the proceedings for viewers that don’t watch cable news all day, every day and that are more geared towards attracting viewers than legal education.
A post by Christy later that day cheered a Republican congressman complaining that Cannon's status as a Trump-appointed judge was called out:
Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett (R) joined CNN Primetime host Kailtan Collins on Thursday for a discussion that included a tense back and forth about whether CNN is creating “doubt in the mind of the public” by attacking Judge Aileen Cannon in the case of former President Trump’s second indictment with an exasperated Burchett telling Collins “I mean, come on, you're CNN, we know that, it’s just the game we all play.”
While lamenting that networks like CNN are attempting to try the case on air, Burchett also condemned the network for having “already started attacking the judge.”
Elaborating, Burchett claimed, “you’ve already started attacking the judge prior to this… if she'd have been a Biden appointee, you'd have been okay with it. So, I mean, you obviously, throwing doubt into the whole judicial system anyway.”
Collins pushed back, “I didn't attack the judge.” Burchett challenged her by pointing to segments earlier in the show and accusing her of throwing “doubt upon her by saying she was a Trump appointee. Why would you say that unless you had doubt about her and you’re creating the doubt in the mind of the public.”
[...]
Despite Collins’s claims to the contrary, Burchett is correct. By attacking the judge by bringing up rulings they don’t like, who appointed her, and her age, they are setting her up as a potential target for condemnation should Trump not be convicted.
Neither Christy nor any other MRC writer admitted that the did the exact same thing he accused CNN of doing when attacking Bragg. Nevertheless, Christy invokved this in crying hypocrisy in a June 22 post:
On June 15, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) accused CNN’s Kailtan Collins of referring to Judge Aileen Cannon as “Trump-appointed” in order to instill doubt in the Trump documents case and questioned whether she would do the same if the judge was appointed by Barack Obama. Collins defended herself by saying “We talk about who judges were appointed by all the time.” Now, less than one week later we have proof from two separate Wednesday stories: one involving a Republican-appointee and one involving a Democratic appointee that shows that isn’t true.
Judge James Moody Jr. is an Obama appointee and he recently issued the radical ruling that Arkansas’s ban on transitioning minors violated the Constitution, but any reference to Obama or the Democratic Party was missing from any CNN report on the matter.
If the president who appointed a judge is irrelevant -- as the MRC is arguing when it comes to Cannon -- why make a big deal of who appointed the Arkansas judge?Christy offered no evidence why it was the Arkansas judge's ruling over turning the anti-transgender law was "radical" and not the actual law itself.
