Movie Bias At The MRC
The Media Research Center predictably loved a Ronald Reagan biopic, predictably hated a film about Donald Trump -- but didn't quite know what to make of "Civil War."
The Media Research Center has long demanded that films adhere to its partisan agenda of cheering right-wingers and bashing liberals. For instance, the MRC hated a 2019 film about Fox News’s sexual harassment scandals while loving a film the same year that smeared a reporter by baselessly claimed she slept with an FBI agent to gain information about Richard Jewell, the later-cleared suspect in the 1996 Olympics bombing — then touted how the Fox News didn’t well at the box office while censoring the fact that the Jewell film did even worse.
That pattern continued in 2024, when the MRC loved a film about Ronald Reagan while hating one about Donald Trump, though it didn’t quite know what to make of another semi-political film. Let’s review, shall we?
‘Reagan’
The MRC has long been a defender of all things Ronald Reagan, demanding that all media coverage of him be never less than hagiography and shouting down any criticism of him no matter how legitimate. So when a new movie about Reagan came out earlier this year, the MRC made sure to play defense and help it play victim. Catherine Salgado complained in a Aug. 16 post:
The star of a new movie about the late President Ronald Reagan is accusing Facebook of targeting the movie.
Actor Dennis Quaid and the marketers for a soon-to-be-released film Reagan accused Meta-owned Facebook of suppressing advertising and promotion of the movie. Newsweek claimed Facebook told them that it “may have been” censorship by mistake, not on purpose.
Quaid, who plays Reagan in the movie, wrote in an email to Newsweek, “Facebook is once again censoring the free flow of ideas, deciding what’s best for us to see and hear; only this time it’s throttling advertising and promotion for my movie about Ronald Reagan.”
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider responded to Facebook’s censorship, “Have you noticed that these ‘mistakes’ and ‘glitches’ by the Big Tech platforms always favor the left? But these glitches aren’t always about limiting conservatives’ actions. Just the other day, Google claimed that there was a glitch that allowed Kamala Harris to attach fake headlines to the logos of media outlets, to her great benefit. The one consistent thing is that Big Tech always favors the left.”
MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris agreed. Morris said, “Here they go again. Notice how Big Tech’s censorship mistakes invariably seem to always be in one direction: in support of the left and against the right.”
Neither Morris nor Salgado offered any actual evidence that any alleged “censorship” was deliberate — they’re more interested in pushing the victim narrative. And despite the complete lack of any hard evidence, this made the MRC’s list of “Worst Censorship of August.”
Christian Toto joined in the victimhood narrative in an Aug. 31 column:
“There they go again.”
No, that wasn’t President Ronald Reagan but Dennis Quaid, the actor who brings the late leader to life in “Reagan.” The movie, out Aug. 30, recalls the president’s remarkable life from his days as a humble lifeguard to leader of the free world.
Getting the word out about the film has been “complicated,” to use a common Facebook phrase.
Quaid shared how Facebook, now officially known as Meta, initially banned “Reagan” marketers from boosting posts tied to the film on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
“Censorship is happening to us through Facebook,” Quaid told the Spotify host. “The content in [the posts] was ‘an attempt to sway an election.’”
Newsweek reported that the problem began months ago after Quaid appeared on a podcast hosted by Dr. Jordan Peterson. Facebook prevented the film’s marketers from boosting a clip from that interview for brand awareness.
Toto didn’t mention that Peterson is a right-wing activist with dubious ideas, so it was obvious were was some agenda-pushing going on here.
Tim Graham spent a Sept. 2 post raging that actual movie critics didn’t like the film, dismissing every single one of them as liberal activists despite offering no evidence to back up the claim:
Our old colleague Kristine Parks at FoxNews.com notes the new movie Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, is strongly liked by audiences with a 97 percent audience score on the site Rotten Tomatoes. But the critics are liberals, and among them, it only had a 26 percent score.
Compare that to the 2016 movie Southside with You, a biopic which gushed over young Barack and Michelle Obama. Both were positive movies, but the Obama film received rave reviews and a 91 percent score by critics (71 percent audience).
Christian Toto told Fox News: “Film critics, by and large, lean relentlessly to the left, and they let that flavor their reviews. So, when a Michael Moore film hits theaters, the response will be glowing, by and large, regardless of the content. The recent projects tied to progressive heroes like President Barack Obama (Southside with You) and Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) are similarly hailed even by those who use the term ‘hagiography.’”
Nick Shrager of The Daily Beast used the H-word for Reagan: “You may have suspected that this MAGA-tinged hagiography would be absolute trash, but it turns out you didn’t think low enough,” he wrote. It’s “the worst movie of the year.”
“Regardless of how you feel about Ronald Reagan the president, most will be united in finding this biopic a preachy, plodding, graceless groaner,” he added. “McNamara’s film is so ungainly and transparent that it plays like embarrassing propaganda.“
Thanks, Tim, for seemingly confirming our hunch that Parks is the writer who penned culture-war attacks at the MRC under the name Kristine Marsh. But if we’re to follow Graham’s partisan conspiracy theory, shouldn’t we also dismiss Toto’s love of the movie because he’s a right-wing activist? Graham doesn’t want to discuss such trivialities when there’s another movie reviewer to bash for not conforming to his preferred ideological biases:
Washington Post critic Ty Burr declared “Quaid offers a congenial impersonation with little depth, in part because depth is not what we wanted (or got) from Reagan.”
Communism? Who finds evil in communism? Burr doesn’t: “Reagan organizes its narrative around its subject’s lifelong fight against the Red Menace, which it assumes we know is bad without being told why. Godlessness, mostly…”
Burr concluded: “The faithful for whom Reagan was made aren’t likely to see that it’s a hagiography as rosy and shallow as anything in a Kremlin May Day parade. As pop-culture propaganda — popaganda, if you will — the movie’s strictly for true believers. As history, it’s worthless.”
It’s especially stupid to (a) suggest there’s nothing provably evil about communism and then (b) compare the anti-communists to a Kremlin May Day parade. He’s just trolling.
Isn’t Graham just trolling by inventing a claim that a movie reviewer is a committed communist so he has a strawman to attack? Meanwhile, the MRC published a review of the film that stuck to the hagiographic script in a form of an Aug. 22 post by Cal Thomas, who gushed that it was “more of a love note to a man who did great things for his country and the world. There could be no better epitaph for any political leader.”
The film wasn’t the only Reagan defense the MRC served up of late. Clay Waters spent a Sept. 17 post Heathering onetime conservative writer Max Boot for committing the offense of engaging in Reagan wrongthink:
Foreign policy columnist and former Republican Max Boot has written a Reagan biography, and it’s insufferable, if the essay by Northwestern University professor Daniel Immerwahr for the September 16 New Yorker, “What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?”, is any indication.
The New Yorker is a “sophisticated” publication with a long, literary history, written for urban lefties by urban lefties, but the political articles aren’t always as knee-jerk liberal as one may expect (perhaps because they’re so lengthy that non-liberal facts have more of a chance to pop up).
But that’s not the case for this 4,000-word piece, about the re-education of Max Boot and how he lost faith in his formerly beloved Ronald Reagan. It sounds like every other hostile, condescending liberal journalistic cliché hurled at Reagan over the last half-century. The closest thing to a fresh angle is tying the 40th president to Donald Trump, in order to demonize two Republican presidents at once.
The rest was just old-fashioned liberal bias: That President Reagan was indifferent to civil rights and poor people, a dummy who lived in a fantasy world who ushered in a decade of greed and untrammeled laissez-faire while letting federal deficits go wild, and almost starting World War III with silly Star Wars projects.
Waters also made a point of bringing up “the mortifying scandal of Boot’s wife, Su Mi Terry, being indicted for being a secret foreign agent for South Korea,” even though it was completely irrelevant to his book.
‘The Apprentice’
The MRC was unsurprisingly much harsher on a biopic about Donald Trump. Tim Graham spent an Oct. 12 post complaining that a Washington Post film reviewer argued the film could have been even more critical of Trump:
Washington Post film critic Ty Burr not only hated the biopic Reagan with Dennis Quaid as too soft and bland. He lashed out at the young-Trump movie The Apprentice as not at all harsh enough on Trump. Shouldn’t Republicans always be unintelligent monsters? So say the film critics on the Left.
Burr mentioned both movies near the top of his movie review on the front page of Thursday’s Style section: “The Apprentice isn’t the scorched-earth hit job that Donald Trump supporters have feared and others have hoped for. Nor is it the kind of bland Great Man biopic that would sweep its subject’s flaws and crimes under the rug, as in the recent Reagan.”
The Trump film’s director Ali Abbasi disappointed the Left by saying he didn’t want to make a “political movie.” That might just be a way to expand the audience right in mid-October when it can have political impact. Burr shot back: “If that strikes you as disingenuous or naive or both — if the idea of a Trump movie that isn’t political seems absurd, if even possible — you’re not the only one. (That includes several audience members at the Q&A who expressed surprise that the film wasn’t harder on the 45th president.)”
So Trump should basically be presented as Satan. Burr says Roy Cohn is Satan, several times. The movie is “the tale of how a raw young real estate brat from Queens became Donald Trump under the tutelage of Satan himself, Roy Cohn, who served as Joe McCarthy’s wingman in the 1950s.” Communists are never villains, only anti-communists.
Burr repeats the Satan part here: actor Jeremy “Strong has the showier performance; his Cohn is reptilian and mesmerizingly assured, the snake in the garden of the Big Apple.” And: “the older man takes him under his wing as a blank template for the dark arts according to Roy Cohn, rules of the road that, in Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay, have the blunt force of hindsight.”
This does not sound like an apolitical movie! Then Burr turns to a marital-rape scene, and you ask “the film should have been harder on Trump”?
Graham did note that Ivana Trump did testify that the rape scene happened, though she later recanted. And he doesn’t explain how being an “anti-communist” exempts Cohn from criticism over his job as McCarthy’s henchman.
The MRC’s right-wing film critic, Christian Toto, spent an Oct. 19 column gloating that “The Apprentice” didn’t do well at the box office:
The corporate press pulled out all the stops to promote “The Apprentice,” Hollywood’s latest attack on Donald Trump. Story after story after story. Fawning interviews. False claims that the film is a fair assessment of Trump’s rise to power.
The latter is Hollywood fiction.
And it all failed. Miserably.
“The Apprentice” couldn’t crack the Top 10 in its debut frame, earning a pathetic $1.5 million from 1,740 screens for 11th place. “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” released 31 years ago, earned more on fewer screens ($2.1 million, 1,700).
Toto further whined about the rape scene:
“The Apprentice” goes out of its way to demonize its subject in small and huge ways. The controversial rape scene speaks for itself. Director Ali Abbasi fought to keep that in the finished cut despite legal pressure from Team Trump.
Ivana Trump denies the rape happened, twice, after initially making the accusation in court. Abbasi and co. know better, apparently. An artist eager to tell a balanced story would certainly leave out a questionable detail, no?
No?
We don’t recall Toto or Graham demanding a “balanced story” about Juanita Broaddrick, who signed a sworn affidavit stating that Bill Clinton didn’t sexually assault her before abruptly changing her mind. Instead, he complained about the film’s timing:
Yes, a film hitting theaters weeks before Election Day which shows Trump raping his wife is meant as a nuanced look at the leader. It’s so fair and balanced that Politico compares Stan’s Trump to a young Darth Vader.
Politico repeatedly says (wishes?) the film could tip the balance in the upcoming election. The film’s pathetic box office results suggest that the wish won’t come true.
[…]
Trump is no saint. Making a connection between him and Roy Cohn, brilliantly played by Strong, is a more than reasonable gimmick for a movie like this.
The actual film remains a hit piece. Every time a scene suggests Trump has a flicker of humanity, the rug is pulled out from under him. And the viewer.
And that’s fine. That’s the story Abassi wanted to tell, and he has every right to tell it.
The media should just stop lying and give us the truth.
You first, Christian.
Toto followed this with a Nov. 23 column cheering that the actor who played Trump is purportedly being ostracized in Hollywood for the role, out of fear of retribution from Trump:
So the team at Variety magazine asked Stan to be part of its annual “Actors on Actors” series. The chats pair two awards-season hopefuls to discuss their films, their craft and more.
Stan agreed to the opportunity but ran into a roadblock. No other actor wanted to join him in a conversation.
Why? The answer is almost too surreal to believe, but it’s true. Call it the latest manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
[…]
Hollywood has spent eight-plus years talking about Trump, often in the most negative way possible.
He’s a fascist!
He’s Hitler 2.0!
He’ll end America as we know it!
Now, two weeks after Trump’s re-election, the same industry players are afraid to bring him up in polite conversation.
Why?
The progressive pain is too real, too raw, and they can’t broach the subject at this time. That’s one theory. Another is based on liberal projection.
They’re afraid speaking ill of Trump now will either hurt their careers or invoke the President-Elect’s wrath. It’s not unlike the reasoning behind the “Morning Joe” team meeting Trump over the weekend for an off-the-record chat.
[…]
The “Ruthless” podcast said Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made peace with Trump to avoid his administration targeting their show or, worse, them personally.
They fear President-Elect Trump will round up his perceived enemies, using the power of government to do his personal bidding. Trump did no such thing during his first four years in office.
There’s no tangible evidence he’ll do so now.
Well, that didn’t age well. Trump’s purge of Department of Justice and FBI employees who worked on legal cases against him and prosecuting those who committed crimes in the Capitol riot amply proves that he’s rounding up perceived enemies and using the power of government to do his personal bidding.
‘Civil War’
The MRC wasn’t sure how to react to the movie “Civil War.” Toto spent his April 6 column trying to make it clear the movie’s president was not based on Donald Trump and that the film’s principals have said as much:
Few films have stirred the cultural pot quite like “Civil War.”
The April 12 release envisions a near-future America at war with itself.
Kirsten Dunst leads an ensemble cast including “Parks and Recreation” standout Nick Offerman as the U.S. president. Much of the film’s story has been kept under wraps. The film’s SXSW Film and TV Festival debut let some light shine on the narrative.
Offerman’s president, for example, has fascistic tendencies and is currently serving his third term.
It must be Trump. Of course.If Hollywood has taught us anything over the past seven-plus years it’s that it can’t stop referencing the 45th president. And, almost every time said commentary is unflattering.To be kind.That’s exactly what journalists were hoping from “Civil War.” It’s why they’re trying to get the film’s stars to admit it. So far, they’re striking out.Offerman spoke to a Hollywood Reporter journalist at length about the project during the red carpet premiere. The actor, who famously played a libertarian on “Parks and Recreation,” is a liberal in real life. He still didn’t take the reporter’s bait. He shoos away any suggestion his character is Trumpian to the core.
[…]
His views echoed those of writer/director Alex Garland. The “Ex-Machina” creator has repeatedly said his film is bipartisan. The big picture he wants to share? Let’s stop attacking each other before it’s too late.
An April 7 post by Jorge Bonilla, however, imposed the MRC’s hard-right anti-media narrative on the movie:
“Civil War” has played it extremely close to the ideological vest in its trailers and promotion, but CBS Sunday Morning may have let the cat out of the bag. If true, a promising film may in fact yet be another exercise in Hollywood leftist projection.
Watch as CBS Sunday Morning contributor Ben Mankiewicz gives away a major plot point: that the authoritarian president has, in this instance, abolished the Federal Bureau of Investigation[.] […]
The lack of Hollywood condemnation as trailers were released was, in hindsight, an early tell. We heard nary a peep in this instance. And now we know why.
Writer/director Alex Garland intentionally attempted to dissuade people from trying to glean ideology from the early trailers. He admits as much by writing the rebel forces as being from both Texas and California. But abolition of the FBI these days is a hard ideological lean in one direction.
Whatever post-9/11 reservations the left may have had about the FBI are long gone now, given its embrace of the deployment of those anti-terrorism tools against United States citizens in the political opposition. Federal law enforcement seems to be at the locus of every action taken against American internal dissidents, whether it be pro-life protesters such as Mark Houck, the broad campaign to suppress political speech online, or federal agents showing up at people’s homes over social media posts, among many other intrusions.
Nowadays, only one side of the political spectrum regards the FBI as the instrument of a weaponized federal government, and it isn’t the left.
Is Bonilla admitting that abolition of the FBI is a key right-wing goal/ It appears so. He also leaves out inconvenient information in the examples he cites. Mark Houck’s arrest by the FBI came after an alleged altercation with a Planned Parenthood volunteer outside an abortion clinic (he was later acquitted at trial). The “broad campaign to suppress political speech online” refers to content moderation to combat lies and misinformation. And “federal agents showing up at people’s homes over social media posts” is pretty common, if those posts involve hate or violent threats; the example he provided was of a woman who was visited after making anti-Israel posts, something we thought the MRC was in favor of.
Bonilla concluded by defending his right-wing narrative:
Reasonable people can thus be skeptical of a major motion picture, released ahead of a presidential election, that depicts a runaway authoritarian president who abolished the FBI and brought the country to civil war. The Trumpian braggadocio about military victory is just the cherry on top.
I really hope to be wrong about this, and hope that this is really an independent, thought-provoking nonpartisan film about the perils of political polarization. That is, as opposed to the “Democracy is on the ballot” equivalent of what “The Day After Tomorrow” did for the climate cult.
But Hollywood’s track record on these things indicates otherwise. For the time being? I’m not buying it.
When you’re a right-winger like Bonilla, anyone who fails to conform to his right-wing ideology is seen as an enemy.