An Exhibition of Conservative Paranoia

Exhibit 89: The MRC's Super Bowl of Bias

For years, the Media Research Center has complained about the entertainment at the Super Bowl and loved (or hated) commercials that aired during the game.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 4/10/2024

After the 2020 Super Bowl, mysterious MRC sports blogger Jay Maxson served up two unsurprising posts regarding the Super Bowl. First, he defended President Trump's substance-free remarks about the Super Bowl prior to the game by somehow blaming Obama:

Blame it on "Basketball Jones" sports junkie and former President Barack Obama for making sports analysis a presidential priority over world and domestic affairs. President Donald Trump passed on an opportunity to break down the Super Bowl match-up with the detail his predecessor did on NCAA Tournament brackets, and that makes the current occupant of the Oval Office ignorant about who's even playing in the NFL championship game.

Maxson then defended Trump's know-nothingness by portraying him as being so awesome doing other things and denying the mere idea that the president might not know who's playing:

This president supposedly knows nothing about the Super Bowl, though his attention might be distracted by the coronavirus, "an impeachment trial being soggily conducted in the Senate," an economy to be kept running, recalcitrant countries with whom to diplomatize, and, generally, a whole-ass world to worry about."

Make that an unprecedented economy. Add restoring the nation's court system, creating jobs, eliminating terrorists and fighting off bogus impeachment attempts.

[...]

President Trump -- a man who previously tried to become an NFL owner, friend of Tom Brady and Jim Brown, the candidate for re-election who's running a Super Bowl ad -- doesn't know who's playing in the biggest sporting event of the year? Ludicrous.

In his second post, Maxson echoed the freakout at MRC "news" division CNSNews.com to the halftime show by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, rushing to the defense of a far-right minister who attacked the show:

A former prep football coach in Ohio, now the host of a Christian ministry podcast, is under fire for threatening to sue the NFL over last week's raunchy Super Bowl halftime show. Dave Daubenmire says the performance by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira was pornographic and children watching at home should not be subjected to such. The Complex Sports blog and Right Wing Watch ripped Daubenmire for watching the program and then saying his eternal salvation had been put at risk.

Daubenmire said on the podcast he wants to sue the NFL "for $867 trillion," but later told Newsweek that figure was "a hyperbole." "I said it right off the top of my head, I just threw some big number out there. In my opinion, there's not a big enough number to sue them for.

But in benignly portraying Daubenmire and equating him with James Dobson in denouncing the "trash" show, Maxson failed to tell his readers just how racist and homophobic Daubenmire is. Maxson attacked Right Wing Watch without evidence as a "far Left hate group," but it has documented how Daubenmire has blamed interracial marriage for weakening America and declared that Prince Harry's marriage to Meghan Markle has "poisoned" the royal bloodline. Daubenmire has also asserted that homosexuality must be re-stigmatized and referred to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as "Mayor Pete Buttplug." Further, Daubenmire has declared his "deep respect" for an anti-abortion extremist named John Brockhoeft, who spent years in prison for firebombing several women’s health clinics.

By endorsing Daubenmire, this is what Maxson is endorsing.

2021: MRC vs. The Weeknd

So when The Weeknd was announced as the lead entertainer for the 2021 Super Bowl, Maxson went into full meltdown mode in a November 2020 post:

It's official. The entertainer known as The Weeknd will provide the substandard gutter garbage, sexually explicit, vulgar rot. We're not talking about MTV or even the Grammy Awards here. He's actually the NFL's pathetic choice to headline the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show.

Abel Makkonen Tesfaye (seen in photo), a Canadian who passes as a so-called entertainer and who goes by The Weeknd moniker, has been chosen by The NFL, Pepsi and Roc Nation to keep the bar lower than low for this year's Super Bowl halftime disgrace.

During the recent CBS broadcast of an NFL game, shameless studio host James Brown delivered this “exciting news" to a world waiting for the identity of the next Super Bowl embarrassment, Feb. 7 in Tampa. Family entertainment, it's not. Not even close.

Maxson cited only obscure "lowlife garbage" from early in The Weeknd's career. No mention of anything that more likely landed The Weeknd the gig -- songs like the non-vulgar "Blinding Lights," universally considered one of the best songs of 2020. But Maxson is not here to talk about an artist's work -- he/she's here to spew right-wing rants:

This ongoing parade of trash halftime shows aptly demonstrates the NFL's diminished capacity to provide “family entertainment” under Commissioner Roger Goodell’s feeble "guidance.” The halftime stage has become a showplace for an exposed breast, crotch-grabbing, pole-dancing, twerking, grinding, edited profanities and a dance salute to the murderous Black Panthers.

Atlanta in 2019 provided another low point in Super Bowl history. Travis Scott and Big Boi provided the vulgar, N-wording, women-denigrating rap with the full approval of the National Football League. And a book by Mike Freeman demonstrates that abusing women is no big thing to the NFL.

Meanwhile, in the real world, The Weeknd has vowed to "keep it PG" for his halftime show --a promised he fulfilled, given that Maxson could find nothing to complain about afterward.

That wasn't the only Super Bowl-related meltdown Maxson had that year. In a post a couple weeks before the game, he/she lost it when a sports writer brought up the despised name of Colin Kaepernick:

The Feb. 7 Super Bowl is shaping up as a tale of two great quarterbacks: Kansas City’s young gunslinger Patrick Mahomes and Tampa Bay’s old G.O.A.T. Tom Brady. Great as their legacies are, neither can compare to the one preferred by The New York Times writer Kurt Streeter – Colin Kaepernick.

Yes, sad to say, Kaepernick’s notorious, undeserving name is snaking its way into media discussions about Super Bowl LV.

Kaepernick hasn’t played in an NFL game for more than four years. His mediocre career is over and done with, but the NYT’s Kurt Streeter is still an obsessive fanboy.

[...]

With an underwater career record of 28-30 as an NFL starter, Kaepernick isn’t deserving of a lofty legacy for what he did on the field.

Maxson and the MRC have a serious complex about Kaepernick.

2022: MRC vs. rappers

Surprisingly, the MRC didn't launch a preemptive strike on the 2022 halftime show, even though it featured rappers it has hated over the years like Eminem, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. However, it found plenty to complain about afterwards. In a Feb. 13 post, Elise Ehrhard groused that Eminem -- who she dismissed as an "aging rapper" -- took a Kaepernck-esque knee during his performance:

This year's Super Bowl halftime show was a late nineties/early aughts throwback featuring a number of rappers whose biggest musical hits are twenty years old. Perhaps to stay relevant, one of those rappers, Eminem, took a knee during his performance.

The rapper who once sang, ”All the girls I like to bone have big butts/ No they don’t, ’cause I don’t like that n—– sh–/ I’m just here to make a bigger hit” and ”Blacks and whites, they sometimes mix/ But black girls only want your money, ’cause they’re dumb chicks” is now ready to fight for racial justice!

Left-wing media from NPR to Yahoo said Eminem's knee moment was done in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. I guess saying it was in solidarity with Black Lives Matter (BLM) no longer plays now that the domestic terrorist organization has taken corporate shake-down money and run.

Gotta love how the MRC are suddenly experts on rap lyrics and the N-word when it comes to dismissing opinions they don't like (or to distract from Joe Rogan's use of the word). The MRC labored mightily to attack Black Lives Matter -- but even Ehrhard provided no evidence to back up her wild claim that BLM is a "domestic terrorist organization."

After citing a few right-wing Eminem-bashers, Ehrhard added more of her own:

Eminem did it anyway, but that hardly makes his actions courageous. The middle-aged rapper faces no risks in towing the contemporary left's cultural line. Authentic cultural risk-taking can cause financial and professional loss, such as Enes Kanter Freedom getting cut from the NBA for speaking out against Chinese Communist Party genocide. Kanter, unlike Colin Kaepernick, will receive no multi-million deals from the corporate oligarchy for his actions.

Eminem's most successful days are long behind him. If anything, taking a knee gives the has-been a brief moment of old attention. Sad.

Maxson joined in two days later, first by mocking praise for the show in the"left-stream media," whatever that is. When one writer referenced the NFL's purported effort through the halftime show “to connect with fans and artists who felt alienated by the league’s stance on Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem demonstration against police brutality and racial injustice," Maxson had a performative meltdown over He Who Must Always Be Denigrated:

Fact-checking pause: Kaepernick, who blew off an NFL tryout in 2019, used his disgusting anthem protests in the 2016 season as a springboard to a lucrative career as a professional race-baiter. One who’s bank-rolled by a Nike endorsement, Netflix and ESPN documentaries and other sources of big money. Yet he’s often portrayed by knuckleheads like Jemele Hill and now, Schiavocampo, as a poor, unemployed cast-off.

Maxson eventually got around to dissing the halftime talent as well:

What to conclude? The NFL is now annually peddling rap at the intermission of its marquee event. It just featured Snoop Dogg, rated No. 2 all-time among hardcore gangsta rappers by one source, and Dr. Dre, ranked No. 6 by another source. Kendrick Lamar, who, in 2013, released a song with lyrics threatening to murder his rap rivals, was also on stage Sunday. It’s all so fitting for the National “Felons” League, which saw the former child-beater Adrian Peterson arrested again Sunday, at LAX for yet another episode of domestic violence.

With NFL arrests practically a weekly thing, it’s appropriate that Super Bowls also feature questionable talent on the big halftime stage as well.

That's rich coming from an organization that's apparently cool with Ted Nugent's proclivity for underage girls as long as he keeps spouting right-wing rhetoric.

The next day, Maxson served as stenographer to right-wing sports guy Jason Whitlock, who ranted against the halftime show because “gangsta rappers are not appropriate for Super Bowl halftime" and “Gangsta rap is lyrical pornography. It’s to be ingested in the privacy of your headphones.” Whitlock also huffed that the Super Bowl was somehow “a stage to promote the Left’s vision of equality, a utopia where a handful of powerful elites select winners and losers based on skin color, sexuality, and gender.”

2023: MRC vs. the "black national anthem"

When Rihanna was announced as the performer at the Super Bowl halftime show, the Media Research Center -- which loves to freak out over Super Bowl halftime shows -- tried to get ahead of things. John Simmons pre-emptively ranted in a Sept. 26 post immediately after the announcement:

Do you feel it coming in the air, hearing the screams from everywhere? That’s the sound of all the people that are ecstatic that woke singer Rihanna will be performing at the Super Bowl LVII halftime show.

[...]

While her status as an icon and her talent are not in doubt, she has a long history of supporting anything woke.

In June, Rihanna, along with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, pledged $15 million to organizations that combat climate change and its particular effect on people LGBT members and minorities (because climate change is homophobic and racist).

Furthermore, her beauty company, Fenty, released a series of ads that showed gender-bending men wearing lipstick. She’s also an avid supporter of abortion, but that shouldn’t be a surprise in today’s celebrity culture.

Hopefully, her concert doesn’t have any underlying woke messages in it and we can just enjoy a halftime show simply as a concert. But given her track record -- and the fact that this is an NFL-organized event -- that might be too much to ask.

But Rihanna's halftime show came and went, and the MRC found nothing to get outraged about. So Simmons ranted instead about "Lift Every Voice And Sing" being sung before the game:

Kickoff hadn’t even happened in Super Bowl LVII before we got a heavy dose of progressive agendas being shoved down our throats - along with nachos and wings.

There were two major elements of the pregame ceremony that has something to do with wokeness:

1) Singing Of The Black National Anthem: Singer Sheryl Lee Ralph performed her rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” marking the first time that the song - also widely referred to as the unofficial “Black National Anthem” - was sung before the Super Bowl.

Of all the backwards ways in which progressives try to elevate black voices so that they are viewed as “equal,” this might be the most counterproductive method they choose.

If one ethnic group sings an anthem that only represents themselves and not the rest of the country, doesn’t that mean they are choosing to further the divide they claim is a problem that needs to be addressed?

[...]

Our national anthem is one of the few elements of culture where Americans recognize that no matter how we disagree, we are all citizens of the same country. If we are going to start having every ethnic group have its own national song, we’re not going to be a united country for very long.

Yes, Simmons thinks a song that first appeared in 1900 is "woke." He cited no lyrics from the song he considered to be overly "woke" or objectionable.

Simmons went on to complain that the all-female crew who conducted the annual flyover of the stadium had "a lot of wokeness mixed into it. After all, a progressive organization like the NFL will do anything to magnify the voices and accomplishments of oppressed groups like women." Simmons didn't explain why that was a bad thing.

Bogus commercial battles

The MRC is always happy to help right-wingers play politics with their Super Bowl ads -- or even the lack of one. In 2019, MRC executive Tim Graham -- knowing a good right-wing anti-media narrative when he sees it, as well as being a terrible media critic -- leapt on the claim by tiny Nine Line Apparel that CBS rejected its Super Bowl ad for being too patriotic. Graham huffed: "Networks are well-known for rejecting overt political messaging....unless it's from a sponsor like Nike that has multinational-conglomerate heft, and the message leans a bit left. Liberal messages are also allowed by CBS if you're an arrogant newspaper that imagines you're the saviors of democracy."

Just one problem with this story: it was apparently too good for Graham -- or the Washington Examiner's notoriously right-wing gossip columnist, Paul Bedard, the "friend" from whom Graham lifted the story -- to fact-check. Both rely solely on Nine Line's insistence that CBS' claim that it questioned the company's ability to pay for the ad, which would cost roughly one-third of its annual revenue of $25 million, was just an excuse to reject the ad's content.

Neither Graham nor Bedard bothered to contact CBS for comment. An actual news outlet did: According to USA Today's For the Win blog, a CBS spokesperson said the network never rejected the ad.

Claiming your Super Bowl ad got "rejected" is a cheap way to generate publicity. As ConWebWatch reported in 2018, the promoters of AML Bitcoin -- which made a deal with WND to give away pieces of it to donors -- claimed its Super Bowl ad was "banned," when in fact it had never bought airtime and the network doesn't review content unless airtime is purchased.

That appears to be what happened here. If CBS didn't think Nine Line couldn't pay for the ad, there's no need to review its content -- which is why CBS can credibly say it never rejected the ad.

Graham and the MRC never apologized for promoting this bit of fake news -- it advances a right-wing narrative, after all.

Prior to the 2023 Super Bowl, Graham groused that CNN had on "a writer for 'Religion Dispatches,' a project of the far-left Political Research Associates," to discuss a certain planned ad:

On Friday, The Lead with Jake Tapper on CNN investigated the currently prominent "He Gets Us" TV ads promoting Jesus in terms meant to please centrists and liberals. Comically, CNN presented this largely as a right-wing conspiracy.

Fill-in host Pamela Brown explained: "If you're planning to watch the upcoming Super Bowl, you'll likely see a few ads about Jesus. CNN's Tom Foreman looks into the He Gets Us campaign and why some are calling this a PR stunt for right-wing politics." Notice "some" is the usual phrase for "some left-wing hacks."

[...]

In short, CNN is a sucker for the notion that any attempt to recruit people into evangelical Christianity is inherently political, and inherently opposed to the Left.

John Simmons served up a Feb. 13 post also complaining that the ads were being criticized:

Super Bowl commercials are one of the most anticipated elements of the NFL’s big game. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took exception to a pair of advertisements that were faith-based.

AOC criticized a pair of ads put out by the Non-Profit “He Gets Us,” an organization that tries to portray Jesus and his teachings from a left-of-center perspective.

Both ads focused on a message of loving your neighbor, which is nearly impossible for anyone to find something wrong with. I say nearly impossible because AOC did just that.

Neither Graham nor Simmons noted, as an actual news outlet did, that the "He Gets Us" ads come from a foundation that has found right-wing anti-LGBT and anti-contraception activism. Nevertheless, the MRC still tried to sanitize those ads; a Feb. 14 post by Alex Christy gushed, "The much-talked about He Gets Us ads were about having childlike faith and loving your enemies."

Graham devoted his Feb. 15 column to rehashing how the ads were criticized:

The high-dollar advertisements on Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl 57 were pretty light and humorous, except for the dead-serious black-and-white messages pushing the message “Jesus: He Gets Us.”

This big ad campaign clearly wants to reach young people with Christian messaging in the most contemporary terms, with ads that claim “Jesus was a refugee” or a misunderstood criminal defendant. What’s unfolded is a comedy of liberals furious that anyone would recruit people to worship Jesus, as if it were a vast right-wing Christian conspiracy.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.” If you thought that was too lame-brained to repeat, MSNBC host Joy Reid copy-catted that a bit on TV: “I think it is fair to say Jesus Christ wouldn’t spend millions of dollars on television ads promoting His image.”

Every Christian is instructed by the Bible to share the gospel of Jesus, from person to person, or on television, if possible. It’s not “fair to say” Jesus would somehow oppose that. It’s fair to say liberals hate it because they see religion -- organized or unorganized -- as a malignant right-wing sickness that ruins the culture.

Graham only obliquely referenced the funding and agenda behind the ads, by criticizing someone who brought it up:

On February 11, weekend All Things Considered anchor Michel Martin brought on Josiah Daniels of Sojourners, a “progressive Christian” website. He threw a red flag. “I think that it's sort of the height of Christian hypocrisy to, on the one hand, say we really want to accept everyone, but then on the other hand, you're taking money from people who have worked to curb access to abortion rights or they've worked to curb LGBTQ rights.”

The glaring hypocrisy here is the secular leftist media do not “accept everyone.” With zero dissent, NPR is putting on Daniels to insist Christians “should disassociate from these groups who are working to curb marginalized people's rights.”

In the end, Jesus sounds “divisive” in the book of Matthew: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” Jesus isn’t accepting of everyone. He calls everyone to accept Him. Jesus warned of “false prophets.” These networks and their conspiracy-decrying experts fit the term.

By contrast, the MRC was unusually quiet about the 2024 Super Bowl -- it had nothing to say about Usher as the halftime show, despite years of screeching about previous halftime shows, and it didn’t even repeat its complaint about the singing of the “black national anthem” before the start of the game. This is largely due to the reduced role of sports blogging at the MRC — the mysterious Jay Maxson mysteriously disappeared last April, and John Simmons is apparently no longer permitted to post at NewsBusters (his last post there appeared in October), though his work still appears at the MRC’s right-wing rant site, MRCTV.

Thus, with no other apparently controversy it wanted to talk about, the MRC was reduced to discussing this year’s religious-themed ad — but not in the way it defended a similar ad last year. Jorge Bonilla started a Feb. 13 post by defending this year’s ad, which featuring people washing the feet of their enemies much as Jesus did, which included Joy Reid snarking about foot fetishes:

Bitter racist Joy Reid was joined by John Fugelsang for a few minutes of light blasphemy and literal ignorance of Biblical proportions in an unfunny segment that brightly illuminates the left’s outright contempt for persons of faith. 

[...]

Prior to writing this item, I was fully and blissfully unaware that FeetFinder is an actual thing related to foot fetishism. I wasn’t about to click any further than the basic Google search, so I still don’t know whether Reid was talking about an app or a website. Nonetheless, she tried to make a funny by suggesting that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has a thing for feet. Would Reid make such a joke while discussing Muhammad? We don’t know for sure, but probably not.

Reid then tosses over to Fugelsang, who is the living embodiment of the “I have nothing but contempt for your backwards Christian beliefs” meme. Fugelsang routinely shows nothing but contempt for people of faith, but insists on Scripture in an attempt to shame them into his side of any given argument- a Biblical application of the appeal to authority fallacy.

And as is often the case with Fugelsang and Bible verses, he has no idea of what he is talking about.

[...]

As to the controversial “He Gets Us” ad, Fugelsang loves the fact that it may trigger conservatives but ultimately hates it because it is funded by people who engage in Wrongthink. Fugelsang’s contempt for people of faith rages on, enabled by Joy Reid.

Bonilla was silent on the fact that the ad did, in fact, trigger his fellow conservatives, due to images of a woman’s feet being washed outside of a “family planning clinic” and a white police officer washing the feet of a black man. And he wasn’t going to point out that he clearly believes anyone who’s not as right-wing as he is is committing the offense of “wrongthink.”

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