The MRC's Biased Debate 'Research,' Part 2
The MRC's Biased Debate 'Research,' Part 2
In addition to pouncing on President Biden's shaky debate performance, the Media Research Center raged that Donald Trump was fact-checked and made up anti-media conspiracy theories.
Being a good and loyal PR operation for the Trump campaign, the Media Research Center spent much of June 28, the day after the first presidential debate, obsessing over President Biden’s shaky performance while also complaining that Trump’s performance was also critiqued. It did more of that on June 29:
New York Times Post-Debate Whine: ‘Seizing’ Trump ‘Pounced’ With No CNN Rebuttal
Ruhle Worried Biden’s ‘Weak Performance’ Covered Up Trump ‘Lies’
New York Times Demands Biden Step Aside But Plan To Endorse Him Anyway
Tax-Funded PBS: ‘Visibly Aging Man’ vs ‘Authoritarian-Leaning Convicted Felon’
But the MRC also smelled a highly partisan conspiracy — that the non-right-wing media conspired to hide Biden’s true condition from viewers. It has no evidence of that, but conspiracies must be fed. Jorge Bonilla devoted a June 29 post to rehashing something he wrote in February attacking the Spanish-language channel Univision, “where some of the anchors blatantly told their audience that Biden was fully fit for duty”:
The debate shattered the carefully constructed image of Joe Biden that was fed to Univision’s viewers over the course of the last four years. Viewers got to see for themselves what the network very carefully tried to hide, or at least paper over. The network, like everyone else in the Regime Media, is now scrambling to pick up the pieces of its credibility.
Jeffrey Lord spent his June 29 column praising the right-wing New York Post’s partisan attacks on Biden as somehow credible in hindsight:
Again, to remind, all of this is a full seven years after the Post noted that in 2017 “Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is not new, and it certainly wasn’t a secret.”
To sum up, the knowledge of Biden’s cognitive decline was available to the media. As The Post noted:
…Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is not new, and it certainly wasn’t a secret.
Jill Biden knew. His aides knew. Heck, James Clyburn, the entire Democratic establishment knew.
Indeed they all did know. And so too did the mainstream media. And they said – and did – nothing. Out there by himself was Fox’s Sean Hannity, who began to routinely note Biden’s cognitive struggles.
Now, of a sudden, as the result of a presidential debate in which Biden went off the tracks and illustrated in alarmingly vivid fashion that he is indeed seriously cognitively impaired – the mainstream media and their Democrat allies are demanding that Biden be replaced on the Democratic ticket.
Lord didn’t mention that the Post has such a reputation as a partisan outlet that anything it claims simply can’t be trusted on its face.
Clay Waters spent a June 30 post playing gotcha over PBS’ coverage of Biden: “From fretting about Biden’s age and infirmity in June 2022, to defending his mental acuity in September 2023, and now back to the truth only after the truth was plain to see on live television in June 2024.”
It wouldn’t be an official MRC conspiracy, of course, if Brent Bozell wasn’t loudly ranting about it at a right-wing outlet where he would never have to face questions that are even remotely challenging. Mark Levin’s Fox News show fulfilled that duty:
To discuss the aftermath of the disastrous Biden debate on Saturday night’s Life Liberty & Levin, Mark Levin said there was “no better guest: than Media Research Center “head muckety-muck” Brent Bozell.
Levin began by noting CNN and MSNBC and the rest mocked Fox News and the conservative media for “pouncing” on Biden’s feeble performances. Bozell said the media’s lying has been exposed:
BOZELL: As you saw the debate in progress, you sensed that the left was collapsing in shock at what they were looking at. But where conservatives were concerned, conservatives were just pointing at this and saying, this is what we’ve been saying all about this man. He’s old, he’s feeble, he’s falling apart, and he shouldn’t be president and leader of the free world.
The media are now in a panic because everything they thought about him, everything that we’re saying about him was false.
After discussing the younger, allegedly more charismatic options the Democrats have, from Vice President Kamala Harris to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Levin turned the attention back to the media and how these corporations “need to clean up their act…from the top down.”
Bozell went on to gush: “Donald Trump looked 30 years younger than Joe Biden and he was absolutely on his game. And I think that also helped expose Biden, who came up on the stage, was very frail and there was a very strong, confident, you know, president, former president who knew what he wanted to talk about and talked about it pretty easily.” That’s what counts as “media research” at the MRC.
Graham rages over fact-checking
While Tim Graham’s MRC minions created an right-wing-friendly echo chamber over Biden’s performance, Graham himself focused his anger on one thing: Donald Trump getting fact-checked. He began a June 30 post by ranting:
As we noted PBS tried hardest to support the Biden spin after their disastrous debate, on Friday night, the PBS News Hour strongly stuck to the Biden narrative that Trump lost the debate by unleashing a flood of lies. PBS turned to the badly disguised Democrats at PolitiFact for analysis, whose post-debate analysis couldn’t find anything Trump said was true. They loaded 16 claims that were all rated as false.
Graham then focused on one Trump claim that he tried to parse, that Democrats support abortion until birth, which Graham insists is true because it fits his partisan agenda:
As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, the 2020 Democrat Party [sic] platform opposes all restrictions on abortion. Where they pretend that they stand by Roe’s language about third-trimester abortions, in reality the Democrats pushed the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which would repeal all state restrictions on abortion and allow post-viability abortions.
[…]
As always, they “fact check” the Democrat extremism on abortion by saying late-term abortions are rare, as Putterman added: “So medical experts say situations resulting in fetal death in the third trimester are rare. It’s less than 1 percent of abortions that occur after 21 weeks. And these cases typically involve fatal fetal anomalies or life-threatening emergencies affecting the pregnant women.”
Graham offered no evidence that is any mass abortion of fetuses after viability, which undercuts his argument. As a less biased news outlet pointed out, such abortions are rare and do, in fact, largely involve fetal abnormalities or health emergencies and they “often involve painful, emotional and even moral decisions.” He offered no evidence of any woman who has ever sought an abortion of a healthy fetus at the moment of birth. Graham didn’t explain why he’s denying that such abortions are rare or unjustified.
Still, Graham repeated his partisan complaint in his July 3 column:
Taxpayer-funded PBS is inaccurately branded as the fairest, most unemotional TV news outlet. Anyone looking at PBS right after Biden’s disastrous debate would have realized they were more favorable to Biden than anyone else. They steered clear of the dominant panic among Democrats. They sounded more like the DNC than MSNBC.
On the PBS News Hour on Friday after the debate, they offered a bland introduction: “Analysis of key moments and fallout from last night’s presidential debate.” Then the program aired 20 minutes of other news.
The last two-thirds of that hour were dedicated to underlining that Donald Trump unleashed a “torrent of lies,” so he lost the debate.
First came PBS White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez, a staunch Democrat: “Though praised by Republicans for his debate performance, Trump repeated lie after lie, including this one on abortion.” Trump said Biden’s willing to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.” PBS aired Biden yelling “you’re lying!”
That’s not a lie. The Democrat [sic] platform is clear that there should be no restrictions on abortion. It’s merely rude to point out the obvious.
[…]
Again, PBS co-anchor Geoff Bennett lamented: “Mr. Trump repeated a false claim that he’s made before that Democrats, in his words, will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth.” Putterman said it was false, and dragged out the lame argument that since late-term abortions are rare, it’s false to say Democrats permit them.
This time, though, Graham refused to acknowledge that such abortions typically involve medical issues and emotional and moral decisions in performing them. He also offered no documentation to support Trump’s wild description of abortion as “rip[ping] the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill[ing] the baby.” Instead, Graham ranted that Trump was fact-checked at all:
Bennett wrapped up: “What’s the consequence when a torrent of lies and mistruths delivered with verve and vigor go unchallenged as they were last night?” Putterman helpfully agreed. “I think that the consequences are quite high.”
They concluded the “Trump Lies Hour” with pundits David Brooks and Kimberly Atkins Stohr. She complained Biden failed to counter Trump’s lies, like on abortion! “I expected him to come out and make a clear layup on issues like abortion when Donald Trump was standing there lying about it, one of his many lies of that night, and he couldn’t even manage that.”Amna Nawaz pounded the line again: “David, as Kim noted there, Mr. Trump once again repeated a number of lies we have heard before on things like immigration and abortion and on January 6, all issues that really do resonate with voters. They went largely unchecked in the debate.”
You know who is unchecked? PBS. They tax our paychecks, then relentlessly trash-talk Trump as a liar, and imply Biden is never false. Biden’s only failing is he didn’t call Trump a liar enough. PBS made sure no one could lodge that complaint against them.
Graham didn’t dispute that, outside of his nitpicking over the abortion claim, Trump did in fact tell the lies he was accused of spreading. But he doesn’t explain why Trump’s lies should never be called out and that he should be given a pass for telling them (you know, like the MRC is).
Graham also doesn’t take the stance that would avoid Trump getting called out for his lies: telling Trump to stop spreading them.
One more thing: Graham also displays his biased partisanship by using “Democrat” where “Democratic” is the grammatically correct word. It also discredits him from being taken seriously as a media critic.
Biden shills?
Biden’s performance gave the MRC all the excuse it needed to push its “liberal media” narrative, this time with the unproven conspiratorial twist that non-right-wing media deliberately hid Biden’s condition from the public. MRC writer Jorge Bonilla cranked out a series of posts framed around that narrative, complete with provocative all-caps headlines designed more for clickability and narrative reinforcement than for accuracy. A July 4 post carried the headline “UNDER SIEGE”:
The Regime Media continue their slow turn against President Joe Biden. In manners of both style and substance, previously sycophantic coverage has turned skeptical and borderline adversarial. Humiliated by their failure to report on what the American people plainly beheld, President Biden’s accelerating cognitive decline, the media are now scrambling to play catch-up.
[…]
This, in a nutshell, is your thematic summary for today’s evening packages across the dial. The on-air talents made sure to note that Biden is meeting with the governors, that he met or had calls with senior Dem leadership on The Hill, and his statements of intent to remain in the race.
There was, of course, universal mention of Rep. Raul Grijalva’s call for Biden to step down. Each of these calls to step down will be reported as a drip, drip in order to create a preference cascade. It’ll be like singing “The 12 Days of Christmas”, but with names of dissenting Members of Congress.
But where things shift is that they also checked Biden on the reasons he proffered as underlying causes for his terrible debate performance: a cold, initially, and now also jet lag. Prior to the debate, this would have been covered very lightly, if at all. There were also mentions of the teleprompter Biden is reliant upon, and mentions of the brutal post-debate polling that has emerged.
[…]
Coverage of the ongoing Biden saga has been revelatory. Democrats, with their mouths, continue to press fealty to Joe Biden. But the media that they whisper to are ready to play Paul Ryan to Biden’s grandma, per the old campaign commercials, and roll Biden off a cliff.
They would’ve already done so had they not gaslit the American public into thinking Biden was fit as a fiddle. As I’ve said repeatedly, Biden’s decline is the 2024 version of Hunter’s laptop: an inconvenient and devastating story that was suppressed or hidden from view because the media didn’t like the people advancing the story. In both cases, the right.
Bonilla failed to disclose that he and his employer are part of “the right” that seeks to gain political advantage from hammering on this story — or that the MRC was part of the “regime media” Bonilla now despises when Donald Trump was president.
Bonilla devoted a July 5 post to framing an interview Biden did with ABC’s George Stehanopoulos as an attempt to force Biden out of the race:
In the midst of this news vortex wherein the Regime Media want to rehabilitate their reputations after co-conspiring to hide President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline from the American public, we get tonight’s ABC News interview. George Stephanopoulos sitting down with Biden, hoping to create a moment that either saved the campaign or put it out of its misery. But tonight we got neither.
Think about it. Why else would ABC bump the full interview up to Friday night instead of its normally-scheduled Sunday except to gamble on Biden delivering a campaign-ending gaffe?
[…]
The interview could most charitably be described as a “Goldilocks” interview. Stephanopoulos does just enough to appear to be questioning Biden while at the same time avoiding the appearance of a tongue bath. The entire interview had the tone of a familial intervention. The questions were certainly there, but the tone and delivery were more in line with an attempt to talk Grandpa into relocating to the assisted living facility after breaking his hip. And Biden reacted as Grandpa might, with resistance to the idea and slight outrage at even having to answer such questions.
[…]
The post-interview panel came on and threw cold water upon the whole affair, citing D.C. Democrats as saying that the interview didn’t do enough to allay concerns, and Mary Bruce doing her level Mary Bruciest to cheerfully spin this disaster, but the die is cast: Biden is intent on hanging on as the media attempt to atone for 4 years of covering for him and, yes, hiding the decline.
Bonilla offered no evidence to back up his conspiracy theory that the ABC interview was designed to force Biden out.
Bonilla cited examples of Biden coverage to claim a “MIXED BAG” in a July 9 post:
The Regime Media find themselves in uncharted waters as they attempt to provide somewhat adversarial coverage to a Democrat White House. But as tonight’s reporting shows, they are still figuring out how to do that.
[…]
This goes to show you that the media are still scrambling, trying to figure out precisely HOW to cover this ongoing slow-motion train wreck of whether or not Joe Biden stays on the ballot or in The White House before the election. And it is important to remember that the reason the media are scrambling now is because they got caught co-conspiring to hide, or looking the other way if we really want to be charitable, as the rest of the world saw Biden’s very obvious cognitive decline on full display.
Under the headline “RETREAT,” Bonilla complained in a July 10 post that the non-right-wing networks stopped sounding like Fox News on Biden:
After amplifying many of the calls for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential campaign in the wake of his disastrous debate performance, there appears to be a change of mind. After Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos and subsequent retrenchment, the networks have begun to fall back in line.
[…]
ABC’s item on Biden focused mostly on his appearance before the NATO summit, with some time devoted to the RNC platform, Dr. Jill Biden’s own campaign call, with zero time devoted to the Walter Reed Parkinson’s specialist’s visits to The White House, which both CBS and NBC found time to cover. Like CBS, ABC covered the congressional fallout in a separate report.
Ed O’Keefe’s entry for CBS was more of a roundup. In addition to the NATO summit, O’Keefe’s report covered the Parkinson’s stuff, in addition to reaction from Speaker Mike Johnson, and some quotes from Vice President Kamala Harris’s Nevada stump speech. Congressional reaction was covered in a separate report.
NBC’s item filed by Gabe Gutierrez seemed the most comprehensive report, blending all the aforementioned matters with the tumultuous meetings held by House Democrats.
Viewed in sum, it appears that the networks are reverting to familiar patterns- a sign, perhaps, that the Biden debacle may be cooling down not that he’s retrenched. At least until the next debacle.
In all these posts, Bonilla failed to offer examples of coverage from Fox News, even though its right-wing, anti-Biden bias is the lens through which he prefers to view the world and what he and his co-workers are trying to bully the non-right-wing media into being.