The MRC vs. Justice: The Trump Trial, Part 2

As Donald Trump's New York trial continued, the Media Research Center continued to be angry that non-right-wing media reported facts instead of pro-Trump talking points -- and loudly whined on Trump's behalf when the guilty verdict came in.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 8/9/2024

Part of the endless Trump trial coverage on MSNBC was The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell reading what sounded like bad diary entries on courtroom happenings. Porn star Stormy Daniels dressed loosely in black, which “suggested the modesty of a nun.” How bizarre. 

Days later, O’Donnell mocked Trump’s appearance in court. He “leaves his face, with his eyes closed, in tortured elderly shapes when he drifts off into his closed-eye space, his mouth shifts from its preferred scowl to the look of a collapsing old building.” Ever have that feeling of “collapsing building mouth”?

On MSNBC, Brian Stelter told Ari Melber the GOP’s in terrible shape, with all these Trump bootlickers showing up at his trial in Manhattan. “I’m just trying to imagine if any Democrats are going to show up at the trial of Bob Menendez, the senator, or or the trial of Joe Biden’s son Hunter — both of which are gonna happen in the next few weeks! And we’re not gonna see any of this, and that tells you everything you need to know about the differences between these two parties in 2024.”

To which there is an obvious rejoinder: We’re just trying to imagine if any Democrat-servant networks are going to show up at the trials of Senator Menendez or Hunter Biden. No one expects they will be doing gavel-to-gavel coverage for those trials, and that tells you everything you need to know about the Democrat-servant networks.

Graham returned to whine in a May 19 post that Fox News’s highly biased coverage of the trial was called out:

Politico senior media writer Jack Shafer argued on Saturday that Fox’s coverage of the Trump trial in Manhattan exposed a propaganda network — while CNN and MSNBC going into gavel-to-gavel overdrive does not? The headline:

Fox News Is Flipping Trump’s Trial Coverage on its Head

The conservative network is curating its coverage to boost Trump.

The liberal networks are curating their coverage to damage Trump – except it seems to help him instead. The liberals think of their obsession as the definition of “normal” news judgment. How could anyone dissent from their journalistic wisdom and think there are other stories to tell? 

Shafer suggests this is an effort to “coddle Trump-loving viewers,” as if the others aren’t coddling Trump-hating viewers. Then he claims “the numbers don’t lie.” Which numbers? They are sketchy numbers.

[...]

Wait, wait — if Fox is mentioning the Trump trial “about half as often” as CNN or MSNBC, how is that defined as a “brownout”? Shafer explains some Reuters reporters noted Fox was reporting on anti-Israel campus protests — like there’s other news in the world. One selected hour of The Faulkner Focus only had ten minutes on the trial. Outrageous!

Shafer pleases his Politico audience by arguing Fox is “less a news station than a purveyor of conservative propaganda, after all.”

Aside from the nitpicking, Graham didn’t dispute the fact that Fox News has a pro-Trump tilt or promotes conservative propaganda (funny, we thought Graham and his co-workers hated bias in the media), though he refused to hang the “Republican servant” tag on it the way he called the other channels “Democrat-servant networks.” Instead, he went on to whine that “MSNBC only broadcast three of Trump’s outside-the-court reactions, while Fox had 33, and Jack and David [Folkenflik] didn’t identify that as ‘scant.'” Graham didn’t mention whether any of those 33 Trump clips were fact-checked by Fox News or why airing so many of them doesn’t prove that Fox News has a pro-Trump bias.

In another May 19 post, Graham tried to play whataboutism over the cosplay of Republicans outside the courthouse being pointed out:

On Saturday’s Chris Wallace Show, the CNN host couldn’t help making fun of Republicans turning up at the Trump trial all wearing navy blazers, white shirts, and red ties. On screen, the mocking caption was “WHO WORE THE TRUMP UNIFORM BEST?” But New York Times reporter and podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro took it to another level comparing the Republicans to bootlickers of Iraqi madman Saddam Hussein. 

[...]

This clearly looks coordinated as a team effort, much like say, the Houston Astros all wearing orange ties to the White House. When all the leftist women team-dress in white as a pro-abortion sentiment, the media laud it.

There’s a difference between being a sports team or promoting a cause versus sycophantically supporting a political leader on trial for criminal offenses, but Graham sure didn’t see it.

Curtis Houck sounded like a PR writer for the Trump campaign in a May 22 post whining about the amount of coverage the trial has received in non-right-wing media:

Despite the legal justifications viewed as anywhere from flimsy to non-existent, ABC, CBS, and NBC rose to the occasion for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) by spending an interminable 573 minutes on the trial of former President Donald Trump, an un-American leftist charade to influence the 2024 election.

NewsBusters examined every allusion to and mention of the Trump trial on the major broadcast networks during their flagship morning shows, evening newscasts, and Sunday political talk shows, starting with the morning of jury selection on April 15. In the 38 days since the trial began, the networks have dedicated 573 minutes and 25 seconds. 

Put another way, the networks have force-fed viewers more than nine hours of coverage.

Houck refused to explain why Fox News was deliberately excluded from his calculations, and he refused to explain why Trump’s trial didn’t deserve that amount of coverage or why it was “interminable” (though we suppose it would be for a Trump dead-ender like Houck who doesn’t like hearing the truth about Trump get out) -- or why it's "un-American" to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. Instead, he whined that the corruption trial of “liberal Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ)” wasn’t getting similar coverage: “A major U.S. senator is on trial in an election year, facing hundreds of years behind bars. But given his party, the networks have allowed the left to skate by.” A senator is not a president, and Menendez does not have the national profile that Trump does. Yet he didn’t count the Menendez coverage on Fox News either — you’d think he would want to show that coverage to shame those other channels.

Houck, in his headline, portrayed the trial coverage in all-caps as “ELECTION INTERERENCE.” We don’t recall Houck ever describing the right-wing obsession with personally destroying Hunter Biden as “election interference.”

The verdict

As jury deliberations began in Donald Trump’s New York trial, it was time for the MRC to summarize its Trump victim narrative. Houck and Rich Noyes served up an updated coverage count (which, of course, censored any mention of Fox News) that played the victim card in spades:

Jury deliberations have begun in Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump. Regardless of the verdict, Trump’s Democratic opponents have already received a massive media bonus from the flimsy legal case. Unlike the jury in the courtroom, millions of citizens have seen the evidence only as depicted by the liberal news networks — an often skewed version that seemed more designed to embarrass and antagonize the Republican presidential candidate than to scrutinize the merits of the case against him.

Noyes and Houck claimed to be surprised that Trump’s apparent affair with porn star Stormy Daniels — the hush money paid to her being a central component of the case — would get a lot of attention:

Instead of scrutinizing the case against Trump, the networks (especially ABC and CBS) reveled in the tawdry, tabloid testimony against him — even though they had been previously reported years earlier, and had little to do with the question of business records at the heart of the case.

On 91 occasions (sometimes more than once per story), evening news viewers heard allegations that Trump engaged in extramarital sex. Most, but not all, of these references were accompanied by a perfunctory, one-sentence reminder that Trump had denied all such charges.

The word “porn” was used 47 times, compared with 35 instances when the slightly-less vulgar “adult film” modifier was used to describe Stormy Daniels’ profession. Fourteen times, viewers heard that another accuser, Karen McDougal, was a “Playboy” model.

Houck and Noyes didn’t explain why people shouldn’t be told that Trump had an alleged affair with a porn star when that’s central to the crimes that were allegedly committed. They concluded by whining: “So even if the trial doesn’t give liberals the Trump conviction they’ve yearned for, it’s still been an election-year bonanza for Democrats, who’ve enjoyed watching their nemesis getting pilloried by the press.” As if they wouldn’t be doing the exact same thing if a Democrat had done something similar.

The head of the MRC ranted about all of this in a radio appearance:

On the Thursday edition of WMAL’s O’Connor & Company, Media Research Center Founder and President Brent Bozell laid waste to ABC, CBS, and NBC for their “completely biased coverage of Donald Trump” as revealed by our latest study of the sham trial by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg interfering in the 2024 election.

Speaking to co-hosts Larry O’Connor and Mercedes Sclapp, Bozell said “the networks have no right to steal elections this way” with a mammoth 640 minutes since jury selection began and rank bias by omission with only three minutes during their evening shows on Michael Cohen’s perjury conviction and zero seconds on Judge Juan Merchan’s liberal ties.

Most significantly, Bozell implored listeners at the end of the interview to remember these “broadcast airwaves are owned by the American people” and with this “deliberate attempt to interfere with the election” by “deliberately” withholding key facts about the trial, “it’s high time for Congress to hold hearings” because they “have no right to steal elections”.

Earlier in the interview, he conceded the trial’s significance is “so serious that you should expect the networks to treat it seriously” and while “I’ll agree with you completely” that the 640 minutes wasn’t surprising, but a “look inside that coverage” reveals a murderer’s row of bias.

[...]

Bozell also brought up the lack of mentions for Merchan’s conflicts of interest (including his donations to President Biden and an anti-Republican group) as well as how “[o]n average, more than one time every [evening] story, they’ve said that [Trump’s] a criminal.”

When a man is on trial for committing a crime, that’s a logical assumption — and, again, one Bozell himself would be making if a Democrat was involved.

When Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts — which would seem to undermine the MRC’s assertions that the trial was “flimsy” and a “sham” — a lot of right-wing whining followed. Alex Christy huffed in a May 30 post:

The cast of characters that made up the Thursday edition of Deadline: White House were provided the opportunity to give MSNBC’s first response to the news that former President Donald Trump had been convicted in New York. Host Nicolle Wallace and panelists Rachel Maddow and legal analyst/former Mueller probe prosecutor Andrew Weissmann all reacted by waxing poetic about democracy’s “shining moment” and how it withstood attempts by Trump and his allies to delegitimize the rule of law.

Maddow had the first reaction, “Listen, it’s a unanimous jury verdict, unanimous on all counts. This is a definitive and, you know, this is an irreversible verdict. He can appeal. I’m sure he will appeal. But this is everything that the prosecution asked for, from a jury that by all counts took this thing very, very seriously. We counted the deliberation hours down here.”

[...]

Still, Maddow repeated herself, “Those efforts are the test we now have as a country. The people involved in bringing this case have been threatened and intimidated and had everything brought to bear against them in a way that was designed to delegitimize the process in the eyes of the American people. It’s now in the hands of the American people to decide if we will accept those efforts or whether we will stand by the rule of law and recognize this as a fair proceeding.”

Needless to say, Christy and his MRC co-workers disagree with that sentiment since Trump was found guilty.

Nicholas Fondacaro was surprisingly non-hateful in evaluating another TV show’s coverage:

In the wake of the consequential ruling that saw former President Trump convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, CNN’s tone was mostly sober as they went through the play-by-play of what happened in the courtroom and what procedures needed and were to unfold in the coming days, weeks, and months. However, legal analyst Karen Friedman Agnifilo had a pretty major concern: that Trump would get special treatment and not be imprisoned.

[...]

On the lighter end, she said Trump could be sentenced to “probation. He could do community service where he has to pick up trash on the subways … He could do home arrest.”

Houck was more typical in looking at CBS’ coverage:

Thursday’s CBS News Special Report on the guilty verdict for former President Trump reveled in the sham trial brought by far-left Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg as “an extraordinary moment” of “enormous gravity” in which “everything about politics and law and our orientation to both are convulsed as never before”, but bemoaned the incoming “grievance war” from the Trump team and took exception to longtime correspondent Jan Crawford’s reality check.

After it became known Trump was guilty on all 34 counts in the so-called “hush money” trial that’s interfered in the 2024 election, CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell paused to collect herself before saying in hushed tones, “this is an extraordinary moment.”

Chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett concurred, saying “to hear you read what you just read is a moment of enormous gravity for this country” and something “we cannot overlook” as America has entered “completely uncharted territory”.

[...]

Before she irked the rest of the CBS panel, Crawford noted Trump “set the groundwork” for doubt about our system on Wednesday “saying that Mother Teresa would not have even beaten these charges and that the system was rigged” and that “people will believe that”.

Despite saying that and arguing “many people say that Donald Trump caused” Americans to lose “faith in our institutions”, she nonetheless faced serious pushback from O’Donnell and January 6 correspondent Scott MacFarlane when she simply stated the fact that Manhattan is an extremely liberal part of the country[.]

Houck pretended to read the minds of employees at another network:

Not surprisingly, Disney-owned ABC went gaga Thursday over former President Trump being found guilty on all 34 counts brought by far-left Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg relating to the 2016 election, basking in the “incredible verdict” from New Yorkers that they claim had not only “broken” Trump in spirit, but will cause “a significant percentage” of voters to not vote for Trump. In tern, they argued, this could help President Biden — whose campaign broke out in literal “cheers” — secure a second term.

[...]

Three-time bestselling anti-Trump author and longtime correspondent Jonathan Karl opened the doors to what would be a common theme on the ABC News Special Report, which was polling indicates this will be fatal for Trump’s chances.

“Donald Trump is now a convicted felon. Will that affect how voters will view him? And we have seen, David, a lot of polling, including one of our ABC News polls just in the past month, that suggests that upwards of 20 percent of people who have said that they plan to vote for Donald Trump...would reconsider...if he were...convicted of a felony,” he boasted.

Muir concurred and acknowledged “some political pundits will say this was sort of baked in,” but spent the next few moments implicitly arguing this will matter given “how tight the race is” which “will be decided at the margins.”

ABC’s coverage wouldn’t have been complete without chief White House correspondent and chief Biden apple polisher Mary Bruce, who delivered with the revelation that “there were cheers inside the Biden headquarters in Wilmington as the verdict was read” and “these guilty verdicts are a political gift to Democrats, a political gift to the President” to be “running against a convicted felon.”

Hilariously, Bruce tried to cover for her friends by also claiming no one should “expect the President to completely upend his campaign messaging because of this,” and they don’t “want to be overly celebratory and feed into that narrative that this was somehow a witch hunt concocted by President Biden” when he’s “been adamant that he had nothing to do with this.”

Apparently because her employer’s transphobia narrative must be injected everywhere, Tierin-Rose Mandelburg freaked out over an incident outside the courthouse during jury deliberations, when “A grown transgender woman walked up to a gate surrounding the court and pulled up his T-shirt to expose his black bra. Then, in order to escalate things even more, he popped off his bra to expose his bare DD’s (or honestly probably GG’s),” going on to huff, “No matter what side you’re on, for the love of God, keep your clothes on or stay home.”

That refusal to take the verdict well continued on May 31, the second day after the verdict was announced. Jorge Bonilla whined:

It is not enough, at Trump-deranged MSNBC, that former President Donald Trump has been found guilty in the New York business records trial. MSNBC is now arguing for imprisonment for Trump. “Lock Him Up”, if you will.

Watch as the panel discusses sentencing in the wake of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s press conference (click “expand”):

[...]

As the panel discusses Bragg’s press conference, wherein he did not directly answer the question of whether he would seek an incarcerative sentence for Trump, pleads for there to be a jail sentence. Former top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, fresh off of declaring his prosecutorial man-love for Judge Juan Merchán, is now demanding that Trump be incarcerated. At this point, the masks are off.

Regime Media, having enabled this cooked-up trial, now wants to see it through to the end. And there is only one acceptable outcome- the imprisonment of Donald Trump. Election interference, indeed.

A short time later, Bonilla had another fit, this time over NBC hosting “presidential historian, or histerian to put it more accurately, Michael Beschloss” to discuss the verdict:

Thus, NBC Nightly News provides us with an answer to a question no one asked, to wit: what historical perspective can we expect from an anti-Trump hysteric who has howlingly referred to Trump as a “monster” and a dictator, while incessantly comparing President Joe Biden to Abraham Lincoln? Not much, really.

Beschloss delivered a less hysterical take than what his MSNBC viewers are used to, with many platitudes on the rule of law and acceptance of the rule of law. Essentially, he called on Trump to take the L in the name of “democracy”. Even so, he couldn’t resist the cheap shot- comparing the business documents trial with the events leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. 

Exit question: In Beschloss’s view, does America turn into a dictatorship if the guilty verdict is overturned on appeal due to reversible error or on constitutional grounds?

Intern Mary Clare Waldron got to tout a Trump apologist:

Among the multitude of overjoyed news reporters, Friday’s CBS Mornings was no exception, but Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) burst some bubbles, while explaining many parts of the trial which were either downplayed or ignored outright. 

Cotton explained to co-host Tony Dokoupil that the verdict from Trump’s trial will mean little overall in November and strongly criticized its legitimacy:

[...]

It was no surprise Dokoupil and featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers were not pleased with Cotton’s remarks, questioning his view of the trial, his civics and whether he objects purely because his candidate did not win:

Christy served up a coverage complaint:

Former President Donald Trump gave a speech on Friday to denounce his conviction and the preceding trial, but of the three main networks, only NBC bothered to break into their regular scheduled programming and carry it live and give their audience Trump’s perspective.

Trump began speaking at 11:06 a.m. Eastern and included a special report from anchor Lester Holt and correspondent Hallie Jackson. Trump spoke for 20 minutes until they cut him off to analyze his remarks with senior legal correspondent Laura Jarrett.

At the same time, ABC stuck with the liberal ladies of The View and CBS remained with Drew Carey and The Price is Right. CBS reporter Kathryn Watson tweeted the network would only break in if Trump took questions. Later in the day, it would cover President Joe Biden’s press conference about Israel’s latest ceasefire proposal.

[...]

The price of the trial might be right for Trump opponents, but the price is wrong for Trump and his supporters, and the media owe it to the American people to hear Trump make his case for why the whole thing was a sham.

But hadn’t Trump been doing that outside the courthouse all through the trial? What did he add afterwards that forwarded his argument — an argument which, by the way, was discredited by a unanimous jury verdict of guilty on all 34 charges? And nobody was stopping anyone actually wanting to hear what Trump had to say from flipping to a different channel.

The head of the MRC was, of course, given an opportunity to rant about the verdict, repeating a biased MRC coverage “study” — that completely omitted Fox News — from a couple days earlier, ranting that it was “dishonest” for the trial to be covered:

Hours after a jury in far-left Manhattan found former President Trump guilty Thursday on all 34 counts in Soros-backed D.A. Alvin Bragg’s sham trial, Media Research Center’s Founder and President Brent Bozell joined Mark Levin on his syndicated radio show to discuss the MRC’s bombshell study on network coverage of the trial and the “frightening” simpatico between the Biden regime and the liberal, “neo-Marxist” media.

[...]

Bozell then argued the instances of burying and/or omitting key facts of the trial on ABC, CBS, and NBC weren’t “bias by ignorance” but rather “a deliberate attempt to go in for the kill for the Biden campaign” and do the bidding of the President.

“I think it’s got to be the most dishonest media performance I’ve ever seen and by God, I’ve seen a lot,” he added.

Is it more or less dishonest than Bozell smearing non-right-wing media as “neo-Marxist” for no real reason beyond inflaming his audience? Bozell, of course, said nothing about Fox News’ coverage, which was much more favorable, whether the MRC wants to admit it or not.

Houck was angry that CBS allowed someone to rebut Cotton’s Trump sycophancy:

Discussing the Trump verdict in the second hour of Friday’s CBS Mornings, chief political analyst John Dickerson and CBS Saturday Morning co-host Michelle Miller acted as the unofficial Democratic response to Senator Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) interview from earlier as the partisan journalist (Dickerson) and wife of a far-left activist (Miller) smeared Trump voters as possessed with “cultish behavior” and “dangerous” views supporting a man who will “undermine” the country.

Featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers kicked it off with an attempted historical comparison suggesting Republicans are too extreme compared to the 1970s when a chorus of congressional Republicans forced then-President Richard Nixon out.

Dickerson huffed that “politics has changed so much, since” then, chiefly Republicans not respecting democracy because “we saw a test to the electoral system after 2020 when the loser of that race lied, and then some amount of the party rallied behind him” with “an attack on the Capitol” and have still refused to respect “norms.”

He then trashed Cotton for denouncing the partisan leanings of Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg as “very dangerous,” because Cotton and others were “now running down the legal system for the purpose as a way to protect the president.” He predicted such criticism could cause another January 6 and further “undermine” our “system” of governance.

Houck didn’t rebut those arguments — he was just angry someone had a platform to say them out loud. Tim Graham summarized all the verdict-related whining of the past couple days in his May 31 podcast:

The last 24 hours have been like drinking water out of a firehose for us here at NewsBusters as the liberal media have been sounding off nearly non-stop on former President Trump being found guilty on 34 felony counts. Managing Editor Curtis Houck and I pour out the media reactions into their respective buckets ranging from gleeful to a hunger for harsher punishments to a faux-sobriety that everyone can see through.

Houck notes that the faux-sobriety bucket was occupied by the likes of CBS’s Special Report where the panel of anchors and correspondents opined on the “extraordinary” moment America could herself in and the “enormous gravity” of the situation.

In that bucket, I include CNN’s Jake Tapper who has a personal hatred of Trump but pretended like he was dispassionate about the outcome of the case. I also point out that CNN legal analyst Karen Friedman Agnifilo soiled their coverage with the contents of the second bucket: the hunger for the harshest punishment.

Of course, it it had been Joe Biden on trial, Graham and the rest of the MRC would be swimming in that second bucket. Partisanship becomes before facts, after all.