Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Clay Waters tried to revive an old controversy in a Sept. 29 post:
Even on a newscast preceding Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate, the tax-supported PBS NewsHour kept its focus on former president Donald Trump, inviting former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for a ten-minute interview to promote her book, Enough, about her traumatic experiences in the Trump White House and how dangerous it would be for Trump to win a second term of office.
You may remember Hutchinson as the left’s break-out star at the January 6 Committee hearings for the outlandish claims she made, though some of her most alarming allegations against Trump were denied by others. PBS took her at her word, after having spent weeks denying allegations against the Bidens as "unsubstantiated" or lacking evidence.
[...]
The PBS host forwarded as fact Hutchinson’s fiercely contested account of what Trump did on January 6:
Nawaz: Cassidy, one of the most explosive moments from your testimony was when you shared the story about, on January 6, Mr. Trump insisting he wanted to go to the Capitol, then trying to grab the steering wheel to get the Secret Service to take him there. What do you think he wanted to do there? What do you think he would have done if he made it to the Capitol?
Note the distinct absence of PBS reporters crying “unsubstantiated” or “no evidence” when it comes to a serious accusation against Donald Trump, though Nawaz and company deploy those phrases when defending Democrat Joe Biden. Nawaz took Hutchinson’s single-sourced account as the undisputed truth despite denials from sources close to the Secret Service[.]
It seems that Waters has forgotten that this line of attack against Hutchinson didn't age well. As we documented, the Secret Service agents who declared they would testify to the January 6 Committee that Hutchinson was lying -- who have been identified as Trump loyalists and yes men -- quickly lawyered up and refused to testify; when one finally did testify, he conveniently couldn't remember key details. Meanwhile, other witnesses corroborated key parts of Hutchinson's testimony. Given that, Waters' insistence that Hutchinson's account was "fiercely contested" completely deflates, since those doing so have not been found to be credible.
Note that Waters offered only anonymous "sources close to the Secret Service" as an attempt to discredit Hutchinson, as noted in a post by Curtis Houck that he linked to; doesn't the MRC hate anonymous sources? Waters also complained in the headline that there were "no fact checks on her testimony," which is false -- her testimony has been corroborated, so PBS did not need to do any further fact-checking.
Waters went on to whine that "For an eager PBS audience, Hutchinson described her White House time in melodramatic terms of an 'oppressive environment' that made loyalty more important than anything else." Waters didn't even bother to offer any sort of rebuttal, perhaps because he knows (or should know, since it's pretty common knowledge) that Trump is obsessed with loyalty.
