The MRC vs. Justice: The Trump Trial, Part 3

The Media Research Center continued to freak out over Donald Trump being convicted, baselessly brand Alvin Bragg as a partisan Democrat, avoid discussing hush-money implications -- and it had a little episode of Stelter Derangement Syndrome.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 8/14/2024

For Saturday’s Good Morning America on ABC, White House correspondent MaryAlice Parks denounced Donald Trump’s Friday speech, where he attacked the process that ended with him being found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records for “including misleading claims.” Unfortunately for ABC viewers, Parks never specified what these misleading claims were.

In studio, Parks began by recalling that, “Yesterday, we saw President Trump absolutely raging about this case, airing grievances, attacking everyone involved. Republicans then piling on. All of it prompting President Biden to break his silence.”

Who is “we”? ABC didn’t show the speech live. That aside, Parks transitioned to a recorded report and added that Trump is “Promising to appeal his conviction” and that he took to “microphones to fume and rail about the case against him, calling it a scam.”

[...]

It is hard to tell what specific claims Parks is trying to refute. Other fact-checkers have tried to do opinion-checking, claiming former Biden DOJ number three official Matthew Colangelo’s presence on Alvin Bragg’s team was no big deal.

Christy seems not to understand that opinions can be fact-checked if they are based of faulty assumptions. He also whined that “The fact-checkers also took issue with Trump calling the falsification of a misdemeanor because Trump was accused of also trying to cover up some other crime, but that other crime was never specified, leading to serious Sixth Amendment concerns.” In fact, the specific “some other crime” is irrelevant here, since the crime being charged is falsifying business records to conceal a crime.

Jorge Bonilla spent a June 2 post huffing that a historian was pleased that Trump was held accountable for his crimes:

The Regime Media’s selling of the sanctity of the verdict to convict former President Donald Trump in the New York business records trial requires the intervention of, what else...regime historians. 

Watch as CBS Sunday Morning trots out none other than Douglas Brinkley for that all-important historical spin on the Trump verdict, which is laid quite thick here:

[...]

You may ask yourselves why there is such a rush to get historians out there to weigh in on the verdict. Primarily, they are there to bolster calls to defend the sanctity of the judicial process, now that its crass perversion therein has yielded its intended result. 

Bonilla offered no evidence that the unanimous verdict rendered by a panel of jurors after a trial that lasted more than a month, during which Trump was fully allowed to defend himself, was a “crass perversion.”

Clay Waters groused that Trump now has to wear the “felon” label:

In Saturday’s front-page story by New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker on the aftermath of the Trump trial in Manhattan, Baker relished the contrast between Biden and the “felon” Trump, while fiercely defending the Democratic president against allegations his administration had anything to do with the former president’s prosecution.

The print edition headline was over the top: “Biden Denounces G.O.P. Moves To Subvert the Decision of a Jury.” So disagreeing with the verdict in one heavily politicized case is subverting justice?

[...]

Baker dropped the word “felon” a lot, though the actual offense Trump was convicted of, falsifying business records, was a rarely prosecuted misdemeanor, charges boosted up by convoluted and controversial legal shenanigans into felonies. Baker smirked in print: “It says something about today’s politics that running against a felon is not seen as a winning strategy.”

Things really got obnoxious at the end, with Baker letting loose with what seemed like years of bottled-up hostility cherishing the compare-and-contrast between Biden’s presidential public persona and Trump the “convicted felon.”

Like Christy, Waters whined about “the presence of Matthew Colangelo, former third-in-command in Biden’s Justice Department, on prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s team. The press love to pretend that all these Democrat prosecutors — many like Bragg, elected on the promise of prosecuting Trump — aren’t political. We all know if an elected Republican DA in a deep-red district that voted 90 percent for Trump indicted Biden, they wouldn’t demand respect for the prosecutor and judge and jury.” That’s just a bogus right-wing conspiracy theory used to push the never-proven idea that President Biden personally pushed for Trump’s prosecution.

Curtis Houck ran to Fox News to insist that it’s actually non-right-wing people in the media behaving badly over the verdict, not his co-workers:

NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck made his latest Fox News appearance late Friday on Fox News @ Night and partnered with host Trace Gallagher and The Federalist’s Evita Duffy to ridicule the liberal media’s deranged and overly excited reactions to Thursday’s criminal conviction of former President Trump by a Manhattan jury.

Gallagher first had correspondent Matt Finn set the table with a mash-up of clips, including ABC’s The View co-host Joy Behar admitting she lost control of her bladder upon hearing the verdict, The View’s Sunny Hostin claiming she has sources inside the Manhattan D.A.’s office hoping for jail time, and Chris Matthews predicting “violence” by Trump supporters.

Houck reacted by saying it “remind[ed]” him “of the Judge Alito controversy” in that he came away with the same concern for all these hyper-partisan lefties, which is concern for whether they have anything else to occupy their minds besides melting down about Trump.

“[D]o these people have hobbies? Like, do they do things for fun? Like, do they have kids or a spouse or a dog? Like do they like sports? I really wonder what do they do with their free time because it’s so apocalyptic and it’s so like faux doomsday nonsense,” Houck explained to a chuckling Gallagher. 

Um, doesn’t Houck get paid to peddle right-wing conspiracy theories about Democrats? Does he have a family or hobbies? What does he do with his free time besides appearing on Fox News?

P.J. Gladnick gushed over how “CNN’s senior legal analyst has tossed cold water on their jubilation with a devastating analysis of how the prosecutors captured their political prey,” insisting that “the case was based on an outside the statute of limitations misdemeanors federal case which was converted to a felony state case in which the underlying crimes were not even mentioned.”

Tim Graham used his June 3 podcast to repeat those right-wing conspiracy theories about the trial being a Trump witch hunt:

Reporters might admit the Trump convictions are a “political gift” for the Democrats, but they still claim there’s “no evidence” the prosecution was political — and especially, that anyone could claim Biden and his administration were behind it. The networks strongly suppressed the painfully obvious notion that Democrats are prosecuting Trump to damage his re-election chances.

In a piece puffing up Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Washington Post reporter Shayna Jacobs wrote: “Some thought the case was weak. Others — namely the defendant and his allies — continue to insist without offering evidence that it was a politically motivated attack on Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election.” The paragraph right before it noted Bragg was an elected Democrat.

An Associated Press “fact check” by “news verification reporter” Melissa Goldin concluded: “Throughout the trial Trump has said, without evidence, that the indictments were politically orchestrated by Democratic President Joe Biden and his administration in an effort to keep him out of the White House. But Biden and his administration have no control over this prosecution. The case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a state-level prosecutor.”

Even that doesn’t acknowledge Bragg is an elected Democrat, and it doesn’t mention former Biden Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo joining Bragg’s team to get Trump.

As Graham well knows, correlation does not equal causation, and the coincidences he cites do not equal an anti-Trump conspiracy and are certainly not the same thing as “evidence.”

Graham also huffed: “NBC reporter Ryan J. Reilly also played masquerade in an online report: ‘Advance Democracy, a nonprofit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg…’ You know a group is on the Left when the media refuse to label them accurately.” It’s absurd and disturbing that Graham is playing labeling games instead of being concerned that Merchan and Bragg have been the target of violent rhetoric (from his side, we might add).

Still bashing Bragg

After the verdict, the MRC’s attacks on Bragg continued. Mark Finkelstein ranted in a May 31 post that it was fallacious to claim that Bragg was just doing his job:

On Friday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, the show’s go-to person on the Trump trial, commenting on the reaction to the guilty verdicts by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and his prosecutorial team, made a flabbergasting claim: “This is not a group of people, despite what Donald Trump and his Republican allies are saying, that relished this victory, that are rejoicing in it.”

The prosecutors, knowing that the cameras of the world were upon them, might have been able to restrain their enthusiasm. But does Rubin really expect us to believe that—their outward demeanor notwithstanding—on the inside it wasn’t unrestrained revelry?

After all, as even the New York Times has reported, Bragg ran for DA on the platform of being the best person to prosecute Trump. So now that his big day has arrived, Bragg & Co. weren’t “relishing and rejoicing?” Riight.

Finkelstein offered no proof of partisan motivation or that Bragg would be proud of anything other than being a professional who succeeded at his job.

A June 1 post by Sarah Butler pushed the right-wing narrative that Bragg was politically motivated:

On Thursday, CNN’s Laura Coates defended Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the outcome of the Trump trial. In response to those opposing the verdict, Coates argued: “you can’t pick and choose whether the system is fair based on the particular outcome of somebody you’re aligned with.” Congressman Byron Donald reminded Coates that Bragg had campaigned primarily on “getting Trump.”

Coates claimed that Bragg had no political intentions in bringing the case against Trump. She noted that although Trump and Biden were political opponents, Bragg was “not under the purview of the Department of Justice.”

Donalds countered by pointing out why Bragg had run for District Attorney of Manhattan in the first place: “His entire campaign was focused on getting Donald Trump.” Donalds was correct; Bragg often had mentioned litigation against the former president during his campaign.

P.J. Gladnick perpetuated the narrative in a June 2 post:

As we’ve noted for months, the Democrat-allied media energetically present Trump’s prosecutors as nonpartisans enforcing a “rule of law.” They couldn’t possibly be prosecuting Trump to advance their career among Democrats. 

Just about five hours after the guilty verdicts were announced on Thursday, Politico published “Will Trump’s guilty verdict hurt him?” by Adam Wren and Lisa Kashinsky. About halfway into the story is a section that can be best described as blatant Alvin Bragg adulation, “Alvin Bragg sealed his place in Democratic lore,” in which the authors conceded that their beloved Bragg ran on a “Get Trump” platform thus revealing that his case was extremely political, especially since it was delayed to serve as election interference.

Tim Graham got help from a fellow right-wing outlet in pushing the narrative in a June 4 post:

The “independent fact-checkers” have repeatedly pounced on Donald Trump claiming Biden and his team are behind Alvin Bragg’s prosecution, especially CNN’s Daniel Dale, who was a triggered Tigger on this accusation. 

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist offers some hard facts for the pro-Biden media to face in an article headlined “Joe Biden’s Fingerprints Are All Over The Criminal Prosecutions Of Donald Trump.”

At least Dale would feint toward Bragg relying on prosecutorial help from Matthew Colangelo, who came over from being the #3 official in Biden’s Justice Department. 

Again, the invocation of Colangelo just a bogus right-wing conspiracy theory used to push the never-proven idea that President Biden personally pushed for Trump’s prosecution, and correlation does not equal causation. Still, Graham ranted: “The pro-Biden law firm collaborated with the pro-Biden media to make sure Trump stayed on the path to indictment and conviction.”

The MRC is apparently collaborating with the Trump re-election campaign to try and discredit the criminal justice system and create victimhood for Trump where none actually exists. Like the rest of the MRC, Graham wants Trump to be held above the law — otherwise, why would he and his co-workers attack the prosecutor so aggressively for doing his job?

The "election interference" dodge

A key revelation from Donald Trump’s New York trial was that the National Enquirer tabloid worked with Trump to kill the story of Stormy Daniels’ affair with him before the 2016 election. Oddly, the only reference to the Enquirer at the Media Research Center regarding Trump’s trial appears in an April 26 column by Graham (also published at far-right WorldNetDaily), who began thusly:

Eight years ago, the leftist media took great offense to being dismissed by Donald Trump as “fake news,” but they never seemed to grasp this is exactly how they painted the conservative media, as truth-defying propaganda outlets.

When the Trump trial turned to the National Enquirer, we could find national unity that the Enquirer defines “fake news.” The lefties are very excited to remind voters how the Enquirer was a Trump-allied tabloid full of garbage stories. But the liberal media spread some of them.

In May 2016, the Enquirer uncorked some garbage that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had cheated on his wife. ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined 15 and a half minutes spreading the word of this character assassination campaign.

From there, Graham quickly moved toward whataboutism when it was pointed out that Trump colluded with the Enquirer to kill the Stormy Daniels story:

The pro-Biden “media reporters” are still upset this week about the Enquirer and how they played “catch and kill” with Trump accusers, squelching stories that might embarrass Trump. NPR’s David Folkenflik complained to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that burying salacious stories is “not a journalistic impulse, it’s not even a tabloid gossip impulse, this is essentially a partisan or propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign in all but name.”

This is coming from NPR, which aggressively trashed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “pure distraction.” Folkenflik engaged with the story only to dismiss it as “a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor.” When The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories acknowledging Hunter’s laptop was real in March and April of 2022, Folkenflik didn’t file a story with his regrets. He just kept attacking Fox News, his usual bread and butter.

So on the Hunter laptop, we can throw it back in Folkenflik’s face – NPR’s suppression was not a journalistic impulse, and NPR was essentially a propagandistic arm of the Biden campaign in all but name.

Worse yet, we fund it with our taxes. That gravy train should end.

As if the MRC is not a propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign, which should perhaps cause its beneficial nonprofit tax status to be re-evaluated. Graham then descended into a fit of Stelter Derangement Syndrome:

Ex-CNN reporter Brian Stelter said the same thing on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show about the Enquirer: “It has nothing to do with journalism.” David Pecker’s “not a news man. He’s an advertiser! He’s a marketer, and his product was Donald Trump.” Thanks, Sherlock Stelter. Nobody should define Mr. Pecker as a news man.

Like Folkenflik, Stelter squashed the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 as a Murdoch plot, or as a Russian disinformation campaign, because CNN’s a marketer and its product was anyone but Trump (meaning Joe Biden).

Stelter also showed up on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show. Wagner was hopping mad, asking what’s the point of a gag order on Trump when you have a “media-industrial complex that is effectively acting as a public defense line” for Trump? Once again, Wagner can’t imagine MSNBC acting as a “media-industrial complex” for the Democrats.

So does Wagner wish the judge could issue a gag order for the entire conservative media landscape? No criticism allowed of the get-Trump prosecutors and judge? I thought this was a democracy.

Stelter broke out the usual bravado that the liberals live on “Earth One,” and they must see what’s happening on “Earth Two,” which is an alternative universe of hallucinations. Stelter claimed “For Jesse Watters, Trump is God, and that is the programming every hour of every day on these other networks.”

That sounds like some crazy religion. Would Stelter survive a little fact check on whether Fox and Newsmax perpetually pray hourly to the Orange Lord and Savior?

Perhaps Graham, with all of that multimillion-dollar “media research” firepower behind him, can show us where Fox News and Newsmax have been the least bit critical of Trump in recent years? He seems to have forgotten that those outlets are currently being sued by Dominion and Smartmatic precisely because they placed their fealty to Trump above the truth.

Completely absent from Graham’s column are two words the MRC loves slinging at the non-right-wing media: election interference. It repeatedly declares anything that makes conservatives look bad — from calling out right-wing misinformation to purported search bias to Facebook fact-checking — to be “election interference.” The National Enquirer indisputably interfered in the 2016 election — by the MRC’s own definition — through its deliberate suppression of a negative story for Trump’s benefit. Why won’t Graham say the words? Or doesn’t he believe that right-wing meddling is “election interference”?

A dose of Stelter Derangement Syndrome

Trump's trial wouldn’t be a real story at the MRC if it couldn’t work a fit of Stelter Derangement Syndrome into the proceedings. Tim Graham has done this already in his employer’s Trump trial coverage, and he made another SDS contribution in a whataboutism-laden May 16 post:

As part of MSNBC’s never-ending Trump trial coverage, former CNN host Brian Stelter arrived on The Beat with Ari Melber on Tuesday to mock all the politicians and Fox News hosts showing up at the courtroom. Brian tweeted out his proudest soundbite.

STELTER: 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 then found a way to bizarrely blame non-right-wing media for obsessive Trump supporters gathering outside his trial:

Stelter is trying to argue that Trump has a “cult” of celebrity, but it’s also true that the leftist media’s obsessive coverage makes it a more high-profile event for Trump supporters to show up and be seen. No Democrats will want to add any sliver of news-worthiness to the Democrat trials. 

Trump has tried to turn these partisan prosecutions around, as he did with endless scandal probes while he was president. He doesn’t have the luxury of a broad media establishment that will bury embarrassing stories. 

The pro-Trump right-wing media played no role in that? None at all? The victim narrative for Trump by the MRC and others didn’t help build a cult of personality around him that fed such obsession?

When Stelter accurately pointed out that the GOP lawmakers who showed up in Trump cosplay outside Trump’s trial “have nothing better to do, right? Than to sit around, and take their talking points from Fox,” Graham tried to downplay Fox News’ obvious right-wing bias:

Stelter added that “far right” networks like Fox News tried to ignore the trial, but the “big story” coverage of networks like MSNBC have forced them to acknowledge this is big. Once again, just like with the Pelosi-Picked Panel on January 6, Fox is going to carry some of the same “big stories” as the leftist press with a different spin. It’s a little harder to skip stories that 37 national media outlets are obsessing over.

It’s so cute how Graham pretends Fox News doesn’t have an aggressive right-wing bias but, instead, offers only “spin.” He’s also weirdly arguing that Fox News would have completely ignored the Trump trial and the January 6 panel if it hadn’t been shamed into covering it by non-right-wing outlets who understood (as Fox News and Graham apparently do not) that both stories are legitimate and worthy of coverage. Of course, shaming outlets into covering right-wing-friendly stories is a key part of the MRC’s anti-media activism. He’s also effectively admitting that Fox News won’t cover stories that make Trump and Republicans look bad if they can get away with it.

Graham seems to be giving away the game — and conceding that he refuses to hold Fox News to the same standards he hold non-right-wing media outlets. Some “media researcher” he is.