Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has spent the past few decades heaping attacks and scorn on Hillary Clinton, so it's more than a little hypocritical for it to suddenly get the vapors over the spouse of a Republican presidential candidate getting what might be called the Hillary treatment. Tim Graham called up the DeSantis Defense Brigade in a May 21 post:
Everyone should remember upfront before the Republican primaries really begin that Politico is a Democrat outlet. Look no further than Michael Kruse's nasty piece on "The Casey DeSantis Problem." Just read this and think of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, and know how much liberals would freak out:
She is and always has been by far his most important adviser, they say, because she is hesitant to cede that space to nearly anybody else. The DeSantis inner circle is too small and remains so, they say, not only because he constitutionally doesn’t trust people but because she doesn’t either.
Especially forthright are the people who are granted anonymity on account of their fear of retribution given their power — not just his but hers. “She’s the power behind the throne,” a Republican lobbyist told me. “The tip of the spear,” said a Republican consultant.
This is one of the most irresponsible uses of anonymous sources, just to make catty comments with no idea of the vicious anonymous source's motivations. Then Kruse turned to Trump stone-throwers:
“Have you ever noticed,” Roger Stone, the notorious political mischief-maker who is both a DeSantis antagonist and a many-decades-long Trump loyalist, remarked in a Telegram post last fall, “how much Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?” — an agent, in other words, of her husband’s undoing.
As reporters like Fox's oseph Wulfsohnreminded, just last year Politico derided "The return of the Lady Macbeth trope" during the 2022 midterms when it was used against First Lady Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Gisele Fetterman.
We don't recall Graham complaining about those attacks -- in fact, Graham and the rest of the MRC appear to have a case of Jill Biden Derangement Syndrome.Graham went on to tout how "Conservatives slammed the piece on Twitter," continuing to be oblivious to the hypocrisy.
When another piece critical of Casey DeSantis appeared, it was Curtis Houck to go into defense moce in a June 5 post:
Daily Beast executive editor Katie Baker took to her supposedly serious journalistic outfit Sunday with a Mean Girls hit piece on Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis that bordered on infantile in its imbecilic language and proof that, if the person at the top feels this way, it’s a farce for the liberal media to view them as a sober purveyor of real journalism.
Baker’s piece consisted of throwing a conniption over Mrs. DeSantis’s decision to wear “a ghastly black leather jacket” — with an alligator and the phrase “Where Woke Goes to Die” on the back — to Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) Roast and Ride on Saturday as something you’d find in “the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.”
Baker argued it was snugly tied into her husband Ron’s 2024 presidential campaign: “Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud.”
She added that DeSantis was “even more explicit [than Trump] about who he intends to target” (i.e. minorities, in the fictitious world of liberals) with Florida being where not only “woke go[es] to [die],” but “a lot of other people die as well.”
Not having to fear fact-checkers, Baker provided no evidence other than the liberal media’s talking point (echoed by the Trump campaign) that “Florida under DeSantis has had one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation”.
Houck couldn't be bothered to a fact-check either, so we will. Wait, we already did: Florida's COVID death rate is the 18th highest in the country. And, of course, the MRC has no problem going all Mean Girls on women it hates for being insufficiently right-wing, like Alyssa Farah Griffin.
Houck went on to whine that Baker "needs to go outside and touch some grass instead of whine about how Republican women use fashion “to stick it to political enemies” and “a bored, nihilistic shrug,” concluding:
Baker’s puerile bile (dressed up as a supposedly edgy takedown) ended with her lament claiming Mrs. DeSantis’s jacket proved “she is cheering on a spouse who gets his kicks off targeting his fellow Americans,” “down with his message of division and dehumanization,”and “ready for far more power.”
All the while, Baker seethes, the DeSantis are “seething with hate.”
Houck might have a compelling argument if he and his MRC co-workers didn't have a record of doing to women they don't like what he accuses Baker of doing.
Alex Christy spent a July 7 post complaining that Casey DeSantis got fact-checked:
CNN Tonight host Alisyn Camerota tried and failed to fact-check an ad featuring Casey DeSantis where she touted her husband Ron’s record of banning “child mutilation.” As Camerota tells it, DeSantis’s team admits they have no proof of such events ever happening, but that is not true.
[...]
After the clip, Camerota singled out one issue in particular. Addressing The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki, she claimed, “Okay. James? Child mutilation, illegal? It's illegal everywhere, by the way. I mean, obviously, they're referring to, you know, reassignment surgery, but that, it was fact checked by PolitiFact that actually, the governor's office could not provide PolitiFact any examples of this happening to a child.”
The PolitiFact article in question came out in August 2022. In that article, author Yacob Reyes wrote, “The governor's office sent PolitiFact two examples of people who received transition-related surgeries in their mid to late teenage years — one at 15 and one at 17.”
However, to justify a “mostly false,” rating Reyes got hyperliteral, “DeSantis' Florida Department of Health differentiates between children (under 10) and adolescents (10-18).”
By speaking of children, Casey DeSantis was clearly using “children” as a synonym for “minors” and Reyes notes that such operations do exist:
When one commentator pointed out that such gender-reassignment surgeries are rate, Christy huffed that the post "has an agenda to push, but even if that is accurate, 'not common' is not 'never.'" Talk about being hyperliteral.
Mark Finkelstein took on more criticism of Casey DeSantis the next day:
This could be the ugliest liberal-media attack on a candidate's wife in recent memory. On Jonathan Capehart's MSNBC show on Saturday two guests competed to see which one could smear the wife of a Republican candidate with the ugliest epithet.
The two contestants in the mudslinging match were Tara Setmayer of the disgraced Lincoln Project, and ex-Republican David Jolly. Their target was Casey DeSantis, wife of Ron.
Jolly described Casey as "America's Karen." That led a hooting Capehart to tell Setmayer, "Tara, I think David's beaten you in terms of taking my breath away during a segment." Capehart virtually congratulated Jolly on his insult, saying, "'America's Karen:' David Jolly, you went for it!"
But Setmayer was not to be bested in the slander stakes. She promptly riposted, seeking to demonstrate that she could be even nastier than Jolly: "Well, I called her a Serena Waterford wannabe."
Waterford is the character from The Handmaid's Tale who has been described, in a website about screen villains, as "the cruel, fanatically religious wife of Fred Waterford, the dictator of Gilead."
[...]
Try to imagine how the MSNBC regulars would get the vapors if you called Jill Biden or Kamala Harris or Michelle Obama "America's Karen."
Finkelstein might want to look through the MRC archives to see exactly how it treated those women before he goes any farther with that defense.
