The MRC Defends The RNC
The Media Research Center spent the duration of the Republican National Convention complaining that Donald Trump's dark speech and J.D. Vance's inflammatory statements were highlighted.
Every four years, the Media Research Center’s coverage of the Republican National Convention is dominated by complaints that non-right-wing networks don’t give the RNC the fawning Fox News treatment, and this year was no different. Rich Noyes kicked things off with a July 14 “flashback” post on “what to expect” (from the MRC’s narrative, anyway) regarding RNC coverage:
The Trump campaign has announced that the 2024 Republican National Convention will begin as scheduled tomorrow, after the former President was injured in an attempted assassination. Saturday’s shooting will doubtless cast a shadow on the convention, but decades of past coverage suggests that the media coverage will nonetheless showcase journalists’ time-tested criticism of the GOP as an extremist, racist, sexist, mean-spirited mob that must be defeated at all costs.
Sarah Butler wrote in a July 15 post:
During their Monday night coverage of the Republican National Convention, CNN’s faux conservative commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin and liberal activist Van Jones shared their thoughts on how the convention was unfolding so far. Griffin attacked Republicans, per usual, while Jones insulted the African American men who spoke at the convention by suggesting their speeches were “cringey.”
[…]
Jones chimed in that so far, the convention “was kind of cringey to me.” His reason was because “we got half an hour into 8:00. We had four African-American men. There’s clearly an agenda here.” But he was far from done with his rant as he continued:
JONES: There’s an opening to get black men because of the double-whammy of black men feeling the economic pain seriously and also feeling some social dislocation with when it comes to gender and feminism and what’s going on. There’s an opening there but this is not it. I’m going to tell you right now.
Further, Jones had some more rather offensive things to say in regards to the political leaders who were African American that spoke at the convention. According to him, they authentically black: “They -f all four of them sounded like black people who talk about black people, but don’t talk to black people. That’s how they sounded.”
Butler gushed that right-winger “Scott Jennings stepped in and put Griffin and Jones in their place as he defended the African American speakers. He started out by noting ‘Trump’s currently scoring in the 20’s” when it comes to polls concerning African Americans voting for Trump and “their featured tonight, whether you like him or not.'”
Jorge Bonilla whined that CNN’s Daniel Dale served as “Regime Media fact-debater” at the RNC:
After watching that “fact-check”, which is really little more than a debate monologue, I humbly ask you: has the rhetorical temperature been lowered to your satisfaction? It wasn’t that long ago that CNN’s own law enforcement analyst said that “media personalities need to tone it down”. Dale might be well served to follow that wise counsel.
Let’s face it: CNN lured Daniel Dale away from the Toronto Star, with promises of flat bacon and access to on-demand MRIs, for the sole purpose of fact-checking Republicans generally, and Donald Trump specifically. And it is broadly understood that the fact-checking industry is little more than a partisan hack operation performing comms and smearing the opposition.
In Dale’s case, he freely spits venom into the camera without citing sources. What is his baseline for saying “peace in the Middle East” is a lie? Did he search for new conflicts starting from 2017-2021? Did the signing of the Abraham Accords factor in? We don’t know.
Bonilla made no attempt to factually rebut any claim Dale made.
Alex Christy cheered Donald Trump Jr.’s temper tantrum against MSNBC on the convention floor, with a bonus lecture:
While delegates were being counted on Monday during the Republican National Convention, MSNBC sent Jacob Soboroff to the floor to interview Donald Trump Jr. about what his father’s second term would look during Katy Tur Reports. The pair battled over whether Trump was “divisive” before Trump Jr. ultimately told Soboroff to “get out of here” as he spread some fake news over immigration.
Soboroff wondered, “What is that change going to look like, Don? What, practically, your father as president, I think you would even say was a divisive figure, what’s it going to look like in a second term?”
Democracy is about arguments, debates, and disagreements. Every politician is divisive to some extent, including President Joe Biden. What makes democracy worth defending is that we can debate our differences like adults without shooting each other, which is why what happened on Saturday with the attempt on Donald Trump’s life is not just an attack on him, but on democracy.
As for Trump Jr., he replied, “I don’t think he was a divisive figure at all. I think the media created divisiveness around him. They lied about Russia-Russia collusion, they said he was a traitor, they went after him in every which way as possible. If the media actually starts being an honest broker, talking about the things he did, the prosperity he brought, the peace deals that he signed around the world, rather than the disaster we’re living right now, I think you’d do everyone in the country a big favor.”
When Soboroff asked about the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents, Trump Jr. sneered, to Christy’s approval: “It’s MSDNC, so I expect nothing less from you clowns, even today, even 48 hours later, you couldn’t wait. You couldn’t wait with your lies and with your nonsense, so just get out of here.”
Clay Waters spent a July 17 post complaining that PBS accurately described the convention’s tone:
Night Two of coverage of the Republican National Convention was “Make America Safe Once Again,” with politicians and ordinary Americans making speeches relaying stories about crime and the illegal immigration that causes some of that crime. PBS reporters and anchors sounded the alarm from the start, warning that Republicans are trying to instill unwarranted fear and anxiety in voters.
At 7:08 p.m. (ET), Lisa Desjardins, PBS’s sole reporter on the convention floor, warned viewers of the PBS News Hour, with a tone of dismissal and disapproval, to watch out for the Republicans setting a dark tone and spreading fear, and that smart journalists know better.
[…]
David Brooks, a New York Times columnist that supposedly holds up the right on the PBS News Hour’s Friday evening political roundtable, didn’t exactly make a conservative defense, instead bashing conservative controversialist Tucker Carlson.
Waters glossed over the fact that Brooks was talking about Carlson because he was at the RNC (mentioned only in a transcript excerpt) and would later speak at the convention — and he said nothing about why Carlson is a “controversialist” (like his sucking up to Vladimir Putin, which the MRC was reluctant to criticize).
Waters also complained that PBS pointed out how Republicans use “the word ‘illegals’ to describe people the media now demand be called ‘undocumented immigrants.’ At 8:05 p.m. Capehart was aghast that speaker Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, used the term ‘illegals’ when talking about undocumented migrants.” Waters’ apparent approval of the dehumanizing “illegals” term runs counter to MRC policy regarding other words it considers dehumanizing, like “fetus.”
Defending J.D. Vance
After Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate during the Republican National Convention, the Media Research Center immediately started complaining about criticism of the candidate:
Wallace Praises Kamala Claims She’ll ‘Wipe the Floor With J.D. Vance
Blame Opie! Variety Slams Director Ron Howard for Movie Creating ‘Monster’ J.D. Vance
NBC Reporter Claims Vance ‘Afraid’ to Debate Harris, Gets Slapped Down
MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Peers Into Vance Speech, Finds a White Supremacy
CNN Analyst ‘Worried’ About VP Pick J.D. Vance ‘Eliminating DEI’
Maddow Sees ‘Alt-Right’ In Vance’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Fandom
A post by Catherine Salgado featured Vance parroting her employer’s dubious narrative that it’s “censorship” to correct lies and misinformation; a second post by Salgado headlined “JD Vance, Don Jr. Champion Free Speech at RNC” was mysteriously deleted shortly after it was posted (though it lives on in the Internet Archive).
The the MRC had to do more actual defense of Vance. Christy whined in a July 26 post that Stephen Colbert was hyping an admittedly fake story about Vance doing untoward things with a couch:
Even by his standards, CBS’s Stephen Colbert displayed a shocking display of hypocrisy during his Thursday monologue on The Late Show as he gushed over President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address and hailed Biden’s “humility and self-sacrifice” in order to save democracy. Yet, later, he urged his viewers to spread fake news on the internet about GOP VP candidate JD Vance having sex with a couch because he found the debunked story funny.
[…]
Later in his monologue, Colbert approached the issue of the AP fact-checking the internet rumor that Vance admitted in his book to having sex with a couch and the AP pulling the article. Citing a Mediaite article, Colbert acknowledged the story is bunk, “Reportedly, a PDF search of Vance’s book yielded ten references to ‘couch’ or ‘couches,’ but ‘at no time is the furniture engaged in coitus.’”
However, Colbert’s desire for truth in politics only goes one way. If the truth gets in the way of a good troll, the truth should take a back seat:
A few days later, the MRC flip-flopped on the whole troll thing in an Aug. 1 post in which Tim Graham touted “Trump’s trolling claims that Kamala Harris used to identify by an Indian heritage, and then decided she was black.”
The MRC was also stuck defending Vance’s “childless cat ladies” slur. In a July 18 rant against MSNBC host Alex Wagner, Jorge Bonilla huffed that her “unhinged rant leaves one thinking that Vance missed an opportunity to renew his epic blast at miserable cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable.” But as the insensitive remark gained more traction, it tried to be more serious about it. Curtis Houck devoted a July 26 post to reframing the remarks as something positive that didn’t apply to all childless cat ladies:
In perfectly coordinated fashion this week, the liberal media have gone postal on GOP vice presidential nominee and Senator JD Vance (OH) for 2021 comments about the left being dominated by unhappy progressives who don’t have children.
Everyone in the liberal media have piled on, ranging from ABC, CBS, and NBC on their flagship morning and evening newscasts to major newspapers to the insufferable blogosphere.
[…]
But here’s the important passage the left has left out from Vance’s speech; the left has ignored where Vance showed compassion for both those not able to and struggled to conceive (and how, as evidenced in a brief X thread by the great Kaylee McGhee White, Vance was right in terms of voting behavior):
Houck also tried to reframe another Vance comment:
Come Friday morning, Wang was on ABC’s Good Morning America again to bludgeon Vance with nearly identical meltdowns. This time, she added a new claim, noting Vance “call[ed] for people without children to be taxed more” in an interview with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
What did Vance actually say? He simply argued, “[i]f you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve three kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids.”
Thanks to child tax credits and even a Biden administration promise to end child poverty, we can safely rate Wang’s meltdown as pants on fire.
Which does boil down to, yes, childless people being taxed more.
Brad Wilmouth spent a July 27 post trying to justify Vance’s comment:
On Thursday, as CNN shows hyped actress Jennifer Aniston complaining about J.D. Vance quipping that liberals are mostly “childless cat ladies,” afternoon host Jake Tapper went so far as to have on CNN entertainment reporter Elizabeth Wagmeister to gloat over the story and tie in Taylor Swift.
Setting up the segment, Tapper recalled: “What do Jennifer Aniston, Pete Buttigieg, and Whoopi Goldberg have in common? They are all less than pleased with Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance after a clip from 2021 recently resurfaced. Take a listen to what Vance told Tucker Carlson on Fox back in 2021.”
[…]
It was not clarified that the then-Senate candidate was observing that both men and women who choose not to have children disproportionately tend to be Democrats more than Republicans.
Notably, according to the Wikipedia entries for current U.S. Senators, five out of 16 Democrat women, but only one out of nine Republican women do not have children.
Christy didn’t explain the relevance of that or why it proved Vance somehow right.
Trump speech
Despite talk that he would change his tune after his assassination attempt, Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was the same old rambling grievance-fest — which meant, of course, that the Media Research Center had to defend it no matter what and lash out at anyone who criticized it. Mary Clare Waldron groused about pre-speech criticism in a July 19 post:
As the final night of the Republican National Conference [sic] began, with a crowd overwhelmed with excitement, optimism, and successful polling, it seemed to become harder for the media to find any criticism. Yet as petty criticisms pervaded the networks, MSNBC turned to the never-Trumper Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, in order to find any legitimate scruples with the successful party.
[…]
“Lost the plot,” states Longwell, not a surprising answer from a never-Trumper, and that is exactly why MSNBC had her on. No longer can the media dissect Biden’s failing campaign, and the Democratic ticket which seems to be questioned by more of its own politicians everyday. If they do it would surely mean a definite failure in November. Instead they look towards any and every alternative, highlighting an undeniable bias, and further damaging true journalism.
Of course, the MRC’s idea of “true journalism” is filled with right-wing bias and liberal-bashing. After the speech, a post by Nicholas Fondacaro conceded it was “longwinded” but denied there was anything else wrong:
In the wee hours of Friday morning, following former President Trump’s longwinded nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, MSNBC host Joy Reid continued her theme of the week of suggesting that Trump and President Biden were equal in most things from overcoming similar medical conditions (which weren’t) to being bad candidates.
When it was her turn to rail against Trump, Reid first instinct was to paraphrase a black supremacist character from the Marvel Universe, Erik Killmonger: “MAGA, is this your king?”
She followed up by suggesting that if Biden had given that speech, Democrats would be actively trying to removing him from office and not just their ticket:
[…]
“That was proof that there is not just one old man in the race. Donald Trump is an old man clearly in decline,” she proclaimed, intending to suggest Trump and Biden were equals.
This was seemingly a continuation of her desperate argument from the previous night when she insanely suggested that Biden getting COVID again was “exactly the same” as Trump getting shot in the head.
Back on Friday morning, Reid ignored the fact that politicians repeat stump speeches at every stop they make and suggested that Trump deviating from the written speech (as he’s known to do) was a sign of an elderly “decline”:
Mark Finkelstein whined that an MSNBC host critiqued the speech:
In a bizarre bit of saying the quiet part out loud, on today’s Morning Joe, Jonathan Lemire, MSNBC’s Way Too Early host and Politico’s White House bureau chief, issued marching orders to the rest of the liberal media.
“I do think we need a moratorium here in the media about Donald Trump’s — praising Donald Trump’s new tone. That doesn’t ever happen on this show, mind you.”
So Morning Joe‘s worried that, after an incredibly successful RNC in which Trump struck a softer tone, the media might actually report that, giving Trump an electoral boost.
[…]
Lemire continued to expose Morning Joe‘s theory of the case: Trump’s RNC speech was a missed opportunity in which, softer tone notwithstanding, he didn’t reach out beyond his base. And so, the keep-hope-alive Democrats are declaring, “this is the guy we can beat!” So don’t go messing that up by offering praise of Trump, faint as it might be!
Lemire ended with one more unsubtle point. The belief among some Dems that Trump is beatable explains, “why, of course, there’s so much scrutiny about President Biden’s upcoming decisions.”
Translation: We can beat this guy with the right candidate. All the more reason to dump Biden, STAT!
Graham served up his own roundup of speech criticism to bash:
Staunch Republicans may have loved President Trump’s long speech on Thursday night, but it’s easy to suspect that the journalists watching it were going to go beyond skeptical. Here’s how the Associated Press summed up: “Rebranding Trump, former president recalls shooting details but avoids policy details.” There wasn’t any policy in that speech? Did they expect Trump to read paragraphs from the Heritage Foundation?
NPR.org summed up the media themes: First came “A temporary appeal for unity,” which felt phony to them, followed by “Trump returns to familiar rhetoric.” They absorbed Trump’s recounting of the shooting, but seemed almost relieved when it went back to Build the Wall and Drill, Baby, Drill.
Seconds after it ended, the taxpayer-funded PBS News Hour anchors Amna & Geoff were dismissing it as grievances and “falsehoods.”
[…]
On CBS, John Dickerson underlined the “fact checkers” would be extremely busy chasing down the lies. (But after Democrats speak, they’re too emotionally invested to worry about facts.)
They also broke out into their own Fact Checking mode. ABC anchor David Muir and justice correspondent Pierre Thomas were trying to “correct” the idea that crime is worse under the Democrats.
Graham made no effort to disprove that fact-check or to rebut any other critique. Curtis Houck, meanwhile, had his own whining fit:
Like its competitors on CBS and NBC, ABC’s Good Morning America took time on Friday to get to former President Trump’s Republican National Convention speech and the hubbub surrounding President Biden’s cognitive and physical impairment thanks to the global Microsoft outage. But when they did, they denounced Trump’s “anti-immigrant”, “dark”, and “divisive” speech while continuing to dig Biden’s political grave.
“Former President started with a call for unity and recounting the attempt on his life, but the bulk of his 92-minute speech was a repetition of false claims about the 2020 election and familiar attacks on immigrants and his rivals,” co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos complained in a tease.
Correspondent Rachel Scott bemoaned from the convention in Milwaukee that “Trump said he wanted this speech to focus on unity, to turn the page from the divisive rhetoric after the attempted assassination on his life” but “[t]hat message of unity did not last long” as he went “off script, launching into partisan attacks and making false claims.”
Scott only briefly focused on Trump’s rapturous recounting of Saturday’s assassination attempt on his life before pivoting to “dark rhetoric to paint the U.S. as a nation in decline, and attacking his opponents” and ad-libbing on everything “from inflation to ISIS, trans athletes, to not taxing tips”.
Her most seething comments came in bashing Trump for engaging in “anti-immigrant rhetoric, falsely claiming there’s a surge in violent crime by undocumented immigrants when crime rates have declined in the last two years and promising to create a massive militarized force to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.”
Amazing. The liberal media want to downplay and thus poo-poo the families of those who lost loved ones to incidents caused by illegal aliens.
Later, Stephanopoulos huffed that, “in the end, Donald Trump gave the speech he wanted to give last night” with Scott replying Thursday “was typical Donald Trump” and “just couldn’t help himself” but launch into “false claims and also partisan attacks.”
Houck spent another post complaining that another news outlet pointed out Trump’s lack of unity in his speech:
Though not as bombastic as ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today still made their point Friday about how they viewed President Trump’s Thursday speech at the Republican National Convention, crediting him for his vivid retelling of Saturday’s assassination attempt and the tribute to the late Corey Comperatore, then knocking him for “riffing” and “repeating…grievances, conspiracies, and insults”.
Co-host Savannah Guthrie said in a tease that Trump gave an “emotional description of that attempted assassination” before throwing “fiery red meat” to “the party faithful” then later offered the same notes in tossing to senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson.
“[I]n many ways, it was also a tale of two speeches with the former President returning to the controversial rhetoric more familiar to his campaign remarks, even after promising a departure from the divisions he had a hand in stoking. But at the outset of that 93-minutes speech, he positioned himself as a unifier, describing in dramatic detail, the attempted assassination against him,” Jackson began.
[…]
In the analysis portion, Guthrie told Jackson that the RNC “was…really interesting…because it really — I was so struck by the way convention organizers seem to be pulling off a real softing of Donald Trump” until Thursday with “Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt”, “Kid Rock and the crowds yelling, fight,” and Trump’s stemwinder of a speech that “many, many, many people love, but he’s trying to reach across and get new voters.”
Jackson agreed and said this signaled the belief in the Trump camp to boost base enthusiasm so their “loyalists…show up” so “then maybe they don’t need quite as many of those independent, suburban, swing state voters as well.”
Houck didn’t dispute the accuracy of any of these analyses; instead, he cheered that NBC also served up “devastating” coverage of President Biden’s campaign.