Topic: Media Research Center
When a special counsel was named to handle the right-wing-hyped case of Hunter Biden, the Hunter Biden Derangement Syndrome sufferers at the Media Research Center were initially supportive. Ncholas Fondacaro wrote in an Aug. 11 post:
As NewsBusters reported Thursday evening, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer appeared on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper and laid out the evidence he had so far that pointed to President Biden being involved in his family’s “sleazy” (Jake Tapper’s word) business dealings. It broke open the floodgates of cable coverage as CNN and MSNBC (36 minutes and 37 seconds combined) reacted by claiming Comer had nothing at all. This was all before U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland elevated U.S. Attorney David Weiss to special counsel status to investigate Hunter Biden further.
Following Comer’s appearance on CNN, the network ignored it the rest of the night before spending 7 minutes and 11 seconds Friday morning trying to convince viewers not to believe what they heard from the Oversight Chairman the previous evening.
Alex Christy also seemed excited by the development:
CNN Inside Politics host Dana Bash and legal analyst Shan Wu reacted negatively to the news that Attorney General Merrick Garland as appointed Jack Weiss as special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation by wondering why he still has a job and worrying it implies that Joe Biden is now a subject in Weiss’s investigation.
[...]
For years, the media accused former President Donald Trump of viewing his attorneys general as his own personal lawyers and here is a former Janet Reno counsel lamenting that Garland isn’t doing enough to protect Biden.
Curtis Houck, meanwhile, decided that Weiss' appointment was an effort to protect the Bidens:
Friday afternoon began with a bang as Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland made a move to further protect President Biden, Hunter Biden, and his own tail by giving David Weiss the title of special counsel (while also keeping U.S. Attorney status) to further investigate Hunter.
As CBS’s Catherine Herridge and others sniffed out, Garland’s decision after the collapse of the plea deal between Hunter and the Justice Department encases damaging evidence and shields Weiss from having to appear before Congress. That didn’t matter to ABC, though. Instead, chief Biden apple polisher Mary Bruce and anti-Trump author Jonathan Karl were beside themselves.
Houck didn't mention that his fellow right-wing activists had been demanding for months that Weiss be name special prosecutor and are now moving the goalposts to keep the anti-Biden outrage machine alive.
Fondacaro returned to cheer that some are concerned by the appointmenet:
Immediately following U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement on Friday that he was appointing U.S. Attorney David Weiss as special counsel to further investigate Hunter Biden,cCNN’s panelists were beside themselves. But given a little bit of time, during CNN News Central’s 2 p.m. hour, the feelings didn’t wane as White House correspondent and President Biden’s apple polisher, Arlette Saenz lamented that the investigation was becoming “a more challenging legal and political issue” for Joe.
Kevin Tober hyped how the appointment is supposedly forcing non-right-wing media to focus on the right-wing anti-Biden narrative:
Sunday’s Meet the Press was the first since Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss as special counsel to oversee the investigation into Hunter Biden. Due to this big news, it was impossible for moderator Chuck Todd to ignore the mounting investigations into Hunter Biden’s multiple crimes and he was therefore forced to discuss it with his assembled roundtable. Things got so dire for the assembled leftists that one of them admitted the investigation could damage Biden “pretty seriously.”
Todd fretted that Donald Trump had succeeded in dragging down the “Biden brand” and suggested somehow that Trump was responsible for the appointment of Weiss due to sending former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine.
Another post by Tober, though, lamented that all this wasn't enough to keep people from talking about Donald Trump's criminality:
Much like Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week was forced to discuss the special counsel investigation into Hunter Biden’s multiple crimes. This of course wasn’t without their usual caterwauling about former President Donald Trump’s indictments and the one that’s reportedly coming up later in the week. New Yorkerstaff writer Susan Glasser huffed that America is living in Trump’s alternate reality.
[...]
A woman from the same political party that thinks men can get pregnant, or that humans can control the global temperature, wants us to think Trump is creating an "alternate reality."
This is what we call gaslighting.
What does Toger call it when someone introduces irrelefvant transphobia into a post that's not about it at all? Anything to distract from Trump's criminality, apparently.
Houck, meanwhile, stuck to his own particular narrataive, insisting again that Garland was "rescuing" the Bidens by appointing a special counsel in an Aug. 14 time-count post that concluded by huffing: "With a fourth Trump indictment imminent handed down Monday night, expect any and all allegations – specific or vague – of Biden family bribery, corruption, and/or malfeasance to vanish in favor of fixating on Trump and have it be the driving focus of the 2024 election. And, not surprisingly, the liberal media wouldn’t have it any other way." As we've noted, the MRC doesn't think Trump's multiple indictments are news at all.
Tim Graham repeated this narrative in his Aug. 14 podcast: "Republicans were angry that the Biden Justice Department "promoted" David Weiss to Special Counsel in the Hunter Biden probe. A special counsel, in the legal definition, should be someone new, not someone who's been on the case for five years. But PBS (and NPR's legal reporter Carrie Johnson) didn't think House Republicans were worth quoting or mentioning." No mention (in the writeup, anyway) that Republicans were actually demanding that Weiss be named special counsel, making that alleged anger more than a little hypocritical.
