The MRC vs. Justice: The Trump Trial, Part 1The Media Research Center wants you to believe that Donald Trump is an innocent victim of liberal prosecutors and a biased media -- not that he was on trial for committing felonies over paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged affair.By Terry Krepel A major part of the Media Research Center’s victimhood narrative for Donald Trump regarding his myriad legal entanglements has been to throw around broad-brush smears of those prosecuting him as partisan Democrats -- indeed, it set up that narrative months before his New York trial. A September 2023 post by Rich Noyes (also promoted that day on the MRC’s podcast) complained: TV news coverage of the 2024 campaign has been dominated by the legal cases brought against the Republican frontrunner, former President Donald Trump. Yet even though these cases are taking place in the obviously partisan environment of a presidential election, an examination of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage finds the networks rarely identified even elected Democratic prosecutors as “Democrats.” In targeting Bragg, Noyes wrote: The so-called “hush money” charges against Trump were brought in April by Manhattan’s D.A. Alvin Bragg, who ran and won office as a Democrat in 2021. During his campaign, Bragg frequently reminded voters how in an earlier case he had successfully sued the Trump Foundation, promising: “I know how to follow the facts and hold people in power accountable.” Noyes didn’t explain why it was a bad thing for a prosecutor to be proud of his record of holding people and organizations accountable for their criminal misdeeds, or why the Trump Foundation should be held above the law. Further, the right-wing Washington Examiner article Noyes quoted admitted that Bragg did not, in fact, prosecuting Trump: “No, Bragg did not specifically pledge, ‘If elected, I will indict Donald J. Trump.’ But he promised to pursue Trump and hold him ‘accountable,’ which is liberal code for going after Trump in any way possible.” Noyes didn't share the page from the "liberal codebook" where he divined that knowledge. As Trump's New York trial drew closer, the MRC ramped up the Trump victimhood narrative again. Tim Graham pushed this narrative on his April 3 podcast: Once again in 2024, journalists need to justify treating Trump as a deadly bubonic plague, an impending Hitler. Treating him as one side of an election is dangerous when he is the End of Democracy. Then they claim they only have a bias in favor of Truth. Yes, they’re totally not favoring the Democrats with this foam-flecked Evil Trump coverage. Rather than provide actual evidence of a stolen election, Graham pushed his employer’s dubious conspiracy theory on the subject: Both shows never touched on the Hunter Biden laptop or any other issue where the media suppressed and disparaged true stories. When they couldn’t suppress it, they lied about it, claiming it had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” Then, in 2022, the New York Times and other leftist outlets admitted the laptop was a real thing. This apparently isn’t supposed to dent their “we’re not for Democrats, we’re for truth” spins. Once again, Graham ignored the fact that there was no reason to trust the Hunter laptop story at face value because it came from the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned right-wing rag, and the Post provided no independent corroborating evidence of the laptop’s veracity at the time of the story's publication. Graham’s boss, meanwhile, ran crying to his buddy Mark Levin that the big bad media is just too mean to Trump: On Sunday’s episode of Life, Liberty, & Levin on the Fox News Channel, Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell explained to Mark Levin how the media are relentlessly negative in their coverage of Donald Trump, and focus largely on his legal troubles and avoid covering how President Biden is failing on the issues from inflation to immigration to crime. Needless to say, Bozell and Levin are pretending that Fox News isn’t part of “the media” if they were honest, they would have to admit that the channel that airs Levin’s show largely avoids reporting negative news about Trump, or explain why Trump’s legal troubles aren’t actually news. As Trump’s trial drew nearer, an April 15 “study” by Noyes served up a different angle on victimhood by pretending it was all a partisan sideshow: Barring a last-minute hiccup, today a Democratic prosecutor Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will begin his unprecedented criminal trial of former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s certain presidential nominee in November’s general election. Again, needless to say, Noyes’ definition of “TV news” conveniently doesn’t include Fox News, since that would mean Noyes would have to admit Fox News has shown bias in covering the prosecutors, and it’s a key MRC narrative to never admit that Fox News has any sort of bias. Noyes served up more ranting: From the beginning of these cases, journalists have had a choice in how they frame these various legal challenges to Donald Trump: Democrats vs. a Republican (i.e., a partisan food fight), or nonpartisan law enforcement vs. an accused lawbreaker. Clearly, the editorial choices made by these broadcast networks shows they are framing these cases as the actions of nonpartisan law enforcement officials all of whom just happen to be Democrats. The victimhood crusade continued with an April 15 post by P.J. Gladnick raging at a writer who pointed out that “Trump has consistently been given more freedom and more privileges than virtually any other defendant in his shoes.” In response, Gladnick offered only the rote right-wing attacks against prosecutors Letitia James and Fani Willis and personally attacking the writer as having “hatred of Trump” while calling his column a “fraud.” Curtis Houck fretted about Trump “suffering” during his trial in an April 16 post: Amid the voluminous coverage on the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC this week on the start of the hush money trial brought by far-left Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg against former President Trump, Tuesday’s CBS Mornings whined not enough Americans care about this trial....like ABC’s Good Morning America, who was tickled pink about Trump suffering. Houck offered no evidence he can actually read Karl’s mind the way he is purporting to do here. In a post the next day, Houck melted down over President Biden getting to do presidential things while Trump was stuck in a courtroom: ABC’s Good Morning America and its chief White House correspondent/chief Biden apple polisher Mary Bruce were emanating warm fuzzies and weak knees on Wednesday over their allies in the New York legal system interfering in the 2024 presidential election, preventing former President Trump from campaigning five days a week and allowing their candidate President Joe Biden to have the country to himself. Um, isn’t Houck the nauseatingly hacktastic one by being paid to defend his beloved inciter of riots and lash out at anyone who doesn’t pathologically hate Biden the way he does? Nicholas Fondacaro raged in an April 17 post that people who aren’t white males are prosecuting Trump: Elements of the liberal media don’t see the lawsuits and trials against former President Trump as just tools to score wins for their electoral politics, they also see them as tools to score wins for their racial politics as well. MSNBC host Joy Reid made that abundantly clear during the network’s Monday lovefest for the hush money trial in New York when she praised “my DEIs” for bringing so many charges against the former President. The MRC’s anti-DEI crusade is all about portraying anyone who’s not a straight white male as incompetent diversity hires. Graham spent his April 19 podcast pretending to be befuddled that Trump’s trial was found newsworthy, while lashing out at non-right-wing media for offering non-right-wing takes: The Manhattan trial of Donald Trump on “hush money” charges drew hundreds of minutes of TV obsession this week. The pro-Biden media is now enjoying talking about a “split screen” of Trump stuck in court on trial, President Biden on the campaign trail. ABC morning host Michael Strahan reported on Trump “test[ing] the patience of the judge while President Biden hits the campaign trails in a battleground state.” Graham is essentially demanding that all media outlets be as right-wing as Fox News, which relentlessly attacks Biden and censors most negative news about Trump. An April 21 post by Jorge Bonilla, however, featured the opposite complaint, complaining it was pointed out that the Trump trial would take up most of the media oxygen and crowd Biden out: During the weekly panel discussion on NBC’s Meet The Press, Chief Foreign Correspondent Andrea Mitchell fretted about the trial of former President Donald Trump overshadowing everything President Joe Biden is doing on the campaign trail, to the point of referring to the present media environment as “The Trump Story”. Of course Bonilla made sure to bring it back to Trump being the victim because of “weaponized” justice that is, the same justice normal Americans who commit crimes also face. In an April 23 post, Tim Graham whined that CNN host Dana Bash “pulled out the usual ‘No Evidence fussing” when South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem portrayed the Trump trial as a conspiracy by Democrats to keep Trump in a courtroom and not on the campaign trail. Graham also cheered that Noem stated that prosecutors are “using a woman’s testimony [Stormy Daniels] who signed a letter saying that this affair did not happen, that she has testified in the past that this never occurred.” It was not mentioned that the MRC spent decades touting a woman, Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her even though she testified under oath that it never happened. Bashing Stormy DanielsAs the trial moved to the stage of the initial incident behind the changes Trump’s payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair during the 2016 election the MRC started taking more aim at Daniels herself. A May 8 post by Mark Finkelstein cheered that a commentator criticized Daniels’ testimony: MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos has once again proven himself to be an independent thinker, someone who calls them as he sees them and doesn’t dutifully toe the liberal media line. Finkelstein followed up with a post two days later complaining that Trump’s sleaziness as displayed through Daniels’ testimony will hurt him with women voters and still found a way to play whataboutism: On CNN This Morning, CNN senior political analyst Mark Preston said that porn star Stormy Daniels claiming in court that Donald Trump didn’t use a condom (“protection”) during their alleged sexual encounter constitutes a “sordid detail” that will hurt Trump with women voters in swing states. Graham complained in his May 10 podcast that Hillary Clinton went on “Morning Joe” to talk about the trial and Daniels: Now we’re reliving 2016 in a Manhattan courtroom, and Stormy Daniels was the star witness this week. The richest vein of hypocrisy was Hillary accusing Trump on hush money. He “went to such great lengths to try to squash, bury, kill stories, pay off people, because he understood the electoral significance of them.” As if the Clintons never tried to squash and kill stories by female accusers! Graham didn’t mention that what Trump did in working with the National Enquirer to squash the story before the election is “election interference,” but its own definition of what it accused the non-right-wing media did with the Hunter Biden laptop story. The next day, Graham touted Bill Maher trashing Daniels’ testimony: On Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the host complained about how the Democrats from Merrick Garland on down “blew it at every turn” on creating legal problems for Trump, so now before the election, “it’s Stormy or bust.” Even there, Maher argued porn star Stormy Daniels is a “bad witness” because she has changed her story in front of this jury, from empowered porn actress to victim. Graham rehashed a lot of this in his May 15 column: It’s hard to watch the incessant gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Donald Trump trial in Manhattan without feeling like you’re traveling in a time warp back to 2016. We’re back reliving the “Access Hollywood” tape and talk of how Trump would have never been elected except porn star Stormy Daniels accepted a six-figure check to keep quiet. Again, Graham didn’t mention the fact that, by his employer’s own definition, election interference took place. Still, he did concede that paying hush money to a porn star is probably not a good look, yet he finds a way to play the Clinton Equivocation card anyway: One can only imagine how Melania Trump processed the Stormy Daniels tale, but paying a non-disclosure agreement isn’t exactly maintaining your innocence. That’s why the Democratic prosecutors in New York are pumping this out on CNN and MSNBC, hour on the hour. The Left thinks those religious conservatives are bothered by this, and it should cause them to vote for someone else, preferably that “devout Catholic” Joe Biden. Graham whined further: The “larger story” was the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” In this election cycle, Democratic prosecutors lobbed 91 felony charges at Trump, and the networks largely refuse to even describe them as Democrats, let alone a vast left-wing conspiracy. Neither Graham nor the MRC has proven the existence of a “left-wing conspiracy” they have simply played guilt-by-association that proves nothing but gets right-wing clicks. |
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