Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center did its usual distraction-and-whataboutism routine (with added conspiracy theories) when Donald Trump faced his fourth (yes, fourth) indictment. But a number of other Trump advisers and hangers-on were also indicted with in this Georgia-based indictment, and Mark Finkelstein spent an Aug. 17 post huffing that schadenfreude was exhibited regarding one of them:
On Thursday, it was [Joe] Scarborough's turn to indulge in unseemly gloating, with the target this time being Rudy Giuliani.
Morning Joe opened with clips of Rudy, back in the day as a federal prosecutor, talking about his extensive use of RICO statutes. The show then rolled a current clip of Rudy criticizing the use of RICO statutes in his Georgia election case. Said Scarborough:
"It's sort of fascinating, the perfect circle. This is, of course, what Elton John would sing about in The Lion King: this is the circle of life. "Live by the sword, die by the sword, another way to say it."
If anything is going to stir the Trump base, and even begin to make some non-Trumpists consider whether the liberal establishment is seeking vengeance and not justice toward Trump and his associates, it could be this kind of distasteful reveling.
Asif the MRC doesn't engage in distasteful reveling every time something salacious is reported about Hunter Biden. Clay Waters served up more hypocrisy in another Aug. 17 post:
So just what was then-president Trump thinking when he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in early January 2021, and asked him to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia, which if really there, would have put Trump over Biden in the close Georgia race?
NewsHour congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins seemed confident she knew just what Trump was thinking in her Tuesday evening report -- that he knew “he was short of votes,” but still asked Raffensperger to change the outcome.
Desjardins: [Fulton County District Attorney Fani] Willis launched the investigation in February 2021, a few weeks after audiotape revealed Trump knew he was short of votes in the state, but asked Georgia's secretary of state to change the outcome anyway.
Donald Trump, Former President of the United States: All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.
Compare that blunt declaration of Trump’s guilt with a segment on Tuesday’s edition of Amanpour & Co., which airs on andCNN International. Fill-in host Bianna Golodryga certainly isn’t a Trump fan, but she at least applied a shred of journalistic skepticism, leaving the question of Trump’s mindset open -- a potentially vital part of his legal defense -- while speaking with Darryl Cohen, a former Fulton County (GA) Assistant District Attorney.
We don't recall Waters chastising his co-workers for assuming that every tiny shred of alleged evidence that makes Joe or Hunter Biden look bad is incontrovertible evidence of guilt even though they, unlike Trump, have never been charged with a crime.
Tim Graham spent his Aug. 18 podcast complaining that CNN's Jake Tapper rebutting Fox News' Laura Ingrahamwhining that the non-right-wing media allegedly took too much joy in Trump's indictment by reminding her of how Fox News was exposed as lyting to its viewers and had to pay $787 million to Dominion for those lies:
Fox News host Laura Ingraham led off her Ingraham Angle show Wednesday night suggesting CNN and MSNBC were so excited -- and they just can't hide it -- that Trump faces serious legal peril in four indictments. They're aglow, because they're expecting.
CNN's Jake Tapper sent a savage tweet over Laura Ingraham's video tweet on the leftist media "humiliating themselves" and reveling in Trump indictments and mug shots. Jake was miffed! Fox was wildly unfair to CNN!
[...]
But the worst part was Tapper touting the "*facts*" of CNN. When it comes to defamation, Jake Tapper sat back when a Parkland High School kid compared Marco Rubio to the mass shooter at Parkland. Tapper sat back when Julia Ioffe said Trump "radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did." Tapper sat back when Nancy Pelosi denounced new Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch in her CNN town-hall meeting: "If you breathe air, drink water, eat food, take medicine, or in any other way interact with the courts, this is a very bad decision."
In other words, Tapper doesn't really believe in "fact checking in real time." Not with these smear campaigns.
Graham didn't discuss that Tapper reference to Fox News' defamation settlement either in his podcast writeup or his podcast -- remember, he gave a pass to Fox News' lies because it does such a great job of pushing right-wing narratives that facts don't matter.
Finkelstein returned to an earlier indictment in an Aug. 20 post when Scarborough argued that Trump's constant attempts to delay his various trials makes him look guilty:
On Friday's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough argued that Donald Trump's attempt to push his federal trial related to January 6th back to 2026 is evidence of his consciousness of guilt. It's "not how an innocent person acts,"
[...]
Really, Joe? Defendants don't get to rule on whether they're innocent or not. Juries do. On MSNBC, Trump is presumed guilty as soon as he's indicted (well, it didn't take an indictment).
Would he have advised Hillary Clinton to rush to court in 2016 if she'd been indicted on her email scandal? If Scarborough were Trump's lawyer, even if he firmly believed in his innocence, would he really be advising him to "get to court as quickly as possible?"
Kevin Tober reached back more than a decade -- to the 2012 presidential campaign -- to find a whataboutism card to play when NBC's Chuck Todd fretted that no candidates are calling out Trump for his mounting indictments:
NBC's Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd opened his program on Sunday with a mini temper tantrum due to the majority of the 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls and even President Joe Biden steering away from attacking former President Donald Trump in the manner Todd demands. Of course, the icing on the cake was Todd's insistence that Republicans staying "silent has left a massive moral vacuum in our fraying democracy."
"It used to be that extramarital affairs, campaign trail tears, forgetting a cabinet agency, even a weird scream could end a presidential campaign," Todd bemoaned. "Now Donald Trump has been criminally indicted four times in as many months, faces 91 felony counts, and he still leads the Republican field nationally by nearly forty points."
Todd should look in the mirror. It's ironic that he's fretting over 2012 GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry "forgetting a cabinet agency" was considered a scandal, when his own networkurged Perry to drop out of the race due to his brief brain freeze.
Of course, Tober was also silent on the moral peril of Trump.
Graham was on the anti-schadenfreude beat in another Aug. 20 post:
When Jake Tapper tried to claim it was wildly wrong for Fox host Laura Ingraham to suggest liberal networks were reveling in the Trump indictments, he should have imagined MSNBC regulars sounding giddy at Trump being arraigned in Georgia in "a really dirty, dangerous scary place," where he could end up "really freaked out."
Graham did not explain why Trump should be treated differently from any other accused criminal. Meanwhile, Graham's Aug. 21 podcast noted how "A new MRC evening-news study by Rich Noyes found that Trump's share of Republican media coverage is twice as big a share of the overall percentage as the last time the primary was open eight years ago," and that "Coverage of the Republicans was dominated by Trump's four indictments and the E. Jean Carroll charge of department-store rape." Graham didn't explain why Trump's legal troubles should not be covered.
Graham rehashed the study again in his Aug. 23 column to complain once more that Trump's legal troubles are being covered:
Then reporters say Trump is “stealing the spotlight” from his rivals, as if they aren’t among the ones who manage the spotlight. Voicing over a screen that read “Trump To Surrender After Skipping Debate,” NBC’s Garrett Haake touted Trump as “poised once again to steal the spotlight this week from the party he seeks to lead.”
After eight years of this onslaught, it seems amazing that Republicans are so supportive of Trump in the early polls. Wildly negative coverage of Trump has never hurt him much with Republicans, and in some quarters it drives a sympathy vote. But the pro-Biden media clearly hope independents and Cheney-Kinzinger Republicans will accept their messaging and turn out in droves for Biden.
Network newscasts paired their Trump’s Impending Arrest stories with gushy chronicles of Biden touring Maui displaying his “signature empathy.” Their “news judgment” can be defined as “whatever makes the Republicans look terrible and the Democrats look wonderful is news.”
Graham made no mention of how his favorite right-wing channel, Fox News, covered all of this. Apparently, Noyes never examined it in his study -- even though Fox News's right-wing bias is presumably the MRC's benchmark for how political things ought to be covered -- and no explanation was provided for why the channel was excluded.