Topic: Media Research Center
Long before the third GOP presidential debate took place, the Media Research Center was complaining about NBC being allowed to host it. Geoffrey Dickens huffed in a June 12 post:
With more candidates jumping into the GOP race last week, decisions on which news outlets get to host the Republican primary debates should be coming soon.
Back on June 2, Axios reported NBC, led by Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, made a hard pitch to the RNC (back in February) to moderate one of the GOP primary debates to be presumably broadcast on NBC, MSNBC or CNBC.
However, the Axios story also reported Florida Republican Governor Ron Desantis has “been pushing back against” NBC hosting a GOP debate and with good reason given “MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell acknowledged ‘imprecise’ language….that implied DeSantis didn’t want slavery taught in schools.”
It’s not just DeSantis who should be wary of NBC unfairly rigging the debates. Every GOP presidential hopeful may want to think twice before accepting an invite to an NBC produced debate.
A review of the MRC’s archives shows a consistent and clear pattern of slanted questions to Republican candidates.
[...]
The pattern of bias is clear and established. Republican presidential hopefuls expecting NBC to change its tune for the 2023 GOP primary debates would be foolhardy at best.
As the debate neared, Dickens whined further in a Nov. 2 post:
NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt and Meet the Press host Kristen Welker are set to moderate (along with talk show host Hugh Hewitt) the third Republican primary debate on November 8 and, as NewsBusters warned before the NBC moderators were chosen, GOP voters should expect hostile questions that push a left-wing agenda and are hostile to conservatives and their policy positions.
MRC founder and President L.Brent Bozell challenged Holt and Welker in this letter.
In September, Welker took over Meet the Press moderating duties from Chuck Todd. To help Welker’s first episode, former President Donald Trump agreed to appear. In return, he faced the usual liberal fact-checking interruptions, especially when answering questions about abortion.
Bozell's letter, by the way, was llitle more than a condescending sneer at Holt and Welker, whom he clearly considers to be his moral inferior (despite his having fathered an insurrectionist). There are preening statements like "First, you must understand your role in this debate. It is to present opportunities to the candidates to differentiate themselves from each other." He gushed that his fellow right-wingers "love their country, believe in the dignity of every human being, and have the humility to give thanks to their Creator for making them in His image," presumably unlike Holt and Welker. He also demanded that the hosts sound and act like they work for Fox News, stick to right-wing talking points on issues and "frame" them in right-wing narratives, ultimately demanding that they exercise every ounce of self discipline you can muster to resist the habit of functioning like a Democrat [sic] political operative." Bozell also laughably added: I’m also willing to be schooled if I am wrong." He's lying; part of Bozell's right-wing schtick has always been to never admit being wrong (i.e., his silence when it was revealed that Tim Graham ghost-wrote his syndicated columns; one has to wonder if Graham wrote this letter too).
The MRC was gifted an in-debate hit from one of the candidates, as highlighted in a Nov. 8 post by Nicholas Fondacaro:
One of the fieriest moments of the third GOP Debate Wednesday night was when candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy asked Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel if she wanted to come on stage a resign given the GOP’s sweeping election losses on Tuesday. He also called her out for awarding NBC the privilege of hosting a GOP debate despite how the network pushed the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax.
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Looking into the audience, possibly at McDaniel herself, he said he’d yield her the balance of his time if she wanted to announce her resignation. He also decried how she awarded NBC debate privileges:
You that matter, Ronna if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look at the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will turn over – yield my time to you. And frankly, look, the people there cheering for losing in the Republican Party, think about who’s moderating this debate. This should be Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk. We’d have 10 times the viewership asking questions that GOP primary voters actually care about and bring in more people into our party.
Ramaswamy drilled down by targeting moderator Kristen Welker. “I mean, we’ve got Kristen Welker here. Do you think the Democrats would hire Greg Gutfeld to host a Democratic debate? They would not do it,” he shouted.
In fact, the investigation into possible collusion between Trump and the Russians was not a "hoax," given that the Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian operatives and campaign manager Paul Manafort leaked internal polling data to another Russian operative.
But a funny thing happened at the debate: it was good, even by MRC standards. Tim Graham conceded as much in his Nov. 10 column:
Conservatives were up in arms that the Republican National Committee was allowing NBC News to moderate a presidential primary debate. Given NBC’s record of hostility to Republicans in debates and in general, it seemed like a terrible idea. As it turned out, it was a sober and serious debate with no remarkably hostile or silly questions.
But because Graham had been planning to write about how bad the debate was because it was on NBC and he could no longer do so, he had to figure out something else to write about. So he wined about one media commentator complaining that NBC partnered with right-wing radio syndicator Salem for the debate, whcih contributed a co-moderator in radio host Hugh Hewitt:
Minutes before midnight, after the NBC debate, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy seconded Barr in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter under the headline “Normalized by NBC News.” Darcy groused: “Respected news organizations typically do not partner with right-wing companies known for trafficking in extremism. But NBC News chose another path. On Wednesday evening, the news organization hosted the third GOP debate alongside Salem Radio and Rumble, helping to elevate and normalize both of the far-right outfits.”
Darcy offered the same dire warning on October 17. “It’s no surprise that the GOP, which veered sharply to the right during Donald Trump’s presidency, would select Salem and Rumble as partners,” he wrote. “But it is striking that NBC News would agree to link arms with such organizations.”
What Darcy did not include in these fulminations was the reporting from Puck News that his own network had floated names of conservative media personalities who could serve as co-moderators of a CNN debate, including….Hugh Hewitt.
You will not be surprised that neither post by Dickens attacking NBC over the debate mentioned that it was partnering with Salem.
Graham lamented further that he couldn't complain about the debate in his Oct. 10 podcast:
What do we do at NewsBusters when the GOP debate moderators skip the gotcha questions? The NBC debate was fine. We predicted it might be like John Harwood's CNBC snark festival in 2015, but it wasn't anything like that. None of the questions were unfair or silly... like "Which of your fellow candidates would you 'vote off the island'?" The only question that drew some negative attention was Lester Holt suggested you couldn't make any policy move that could quickly change gas prices.
Presumably, there was no soul-searching about how the MRC shouldn't constantly and reflexively attack and smear all non-right-wing media as "biased.," nor any walking back of his colleagues' attacks on NBC over a purportedly unfair debate. We have also seen no apology from Bozell despite hgis claimed willingness to be "schooled if I am wrong." Right-wingers never apologize, remember?
