The MRC's Debate Histrionics, Part 2

The Media Research Center served up its usual ref-working and pro-Republican rah-rah about the vice presidential debate, raging that the moderators dared to fact-check J.D. Vance.

Nov 12, 2024

Just as it did before the presidential debate, the Media Research Center kicked off its coverage of the vice presidential debate with a round of ref-working. Geoffrey Dickens kicked it off in a Sept. 26 post:

CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan are set to moderate Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate but if their recent reporting is an indicator, viewers should expect a one-sided attack from the CBS Evening News anchor and the Face the Nation moderator.
After the first attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, O’Donnell actually wondered if he was partially to blame as she pressed Rep. Kevin McCarthy on did Trump “bear responsibility” for the “hotter” political temperature and does he need to “change his rhetoric?”
As Trump was recovering from the first shooting, Brennan scolded: “This was a traumatic event no doubt for him, but I did notice there was no call for lowering the temperature, condemning all political violence” on Trump’s social media account.
If those two could be so callous to Trump after that heinous moment, what chance does his JD Vance have in getting fair treatment in Tuesday’s debate against Tim Walz?

Dickens didn’t explain why Trump deserves a free pass for his inciting rhetoric. Instead, he followed with “just a few of the most obnoxious left-wing or anti-conservative outbursts from O’Donnell and Brennan via the MRC’s archives.”

The next day, Alex Christy served up a biased list of “27 additional questions CBS’s Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell should ask Walz as well as three questions they should ask Vance.” Yes, Christy actually had questions for Vance — but they also leaned into right-wing narratives like the Walz questions did. Two were softballs setting up campaign narratives about capitalism and Ukraine, though the third was unusually critical: “Unlike the Republican party’s platform in 2016, the text does not include backing for a 20-week federal limit on abortions. Why would you and Donald Trump offer less protection to unborn children than before?”

Rich Noyes served up his particular dishonest bit of ref-working in a Sept. 30 post:

Tomorrow night, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan will moderate the 2024 vice presidential debate between Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance. Much as we found prior to the presidential debate on ABC three weeks ago, our analysis of CBS’s campaign coverage suggests the event will likely be a friendly venue for the Democratic nominee, and far more hostile to the Republican.
During the two months from July 21 (when President Biden left the race) through September 27, our analysts reviewed all 346 minutes of campaign coverage (161 stories) on the CBS Evening News and its Saturday/Sunday twin, the CBS Weekend News. We found that coverage of Vice President Kamala Harris has been extremely positive (84%), while coverage of former President Donald Trump has been lopsidedly negative (79%). (See Methodology explanation at the end of this post.)
While there was far less discussion of the vice presidential candidates, we found the same wild imbalance: 89% positive coverage for the Democrat Walz, vs. 89% negative coverage for the Republican Vance. Add it all up, and coverage of the Democratic ticket on the CBS Evening News was 85% positive, vs. 81% negative for the Republicans.

As ConWebWatch points out every time Noyes does one of these, his “study” is dishonest and slanted because it pretends neutral coverage doesn’t exist, which artificially and dishonestly inflates his numbers in order to serve up right-wing clickbait.

Later that day, Tim Graham took a victory lap of sorts by cheering that the moderators can’t fact-check the candidates:

Associated Press media reporter David Bauder reported on Friday that CBS News “says it will be up to the politicians — not the moderators — to check the facts of their opponents.” That would be a shocking contrast to ABC.
[…]
Here’s one big reason to distrust “independent fact-checkers” like PolitiFact during and after Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate. Like their fellow Democrats, they’re going to tilt against Vance as the obvious mangler of facts, and unload their ‘fact checking” on him.
Gov. Tim Walz was elected to the House in 2006, and never drew a PolitiFact check until August 7, 2024, after Harris picked Walz as her running mate. In six fact checks, he was ruled as “True” once, “Half True” twice, and “Mostly False” or “False” three times.
None of those were about fact-mangling his own biography. They fact-checked Vance on Walz’s lies. They also fact-checked Vance for getting Walz’s record wrong on “gender-affirming care.”
J.D. Vance was first fact-checked on February 20, 2018, before he ran for anything. Overall now, he has one “True” (the first check), one “Mostly True,” two “Half True,” and 16 on the False side, including three “Pants On Fire” rulings.
So that’s six checks for Walz, three on the False side (50 percent), and 20 checks for Vance, 16 on the False side (80 percent). Or just note the False checks are 16 to 3.The “Pants on Fire” count is 3-zip.

Remember, the MRC thinks that mere fact-checking is “censorship,” even though Graham made no effort to dispute any of the fact-checks about Vance. He’s just mad Vance was fact-checked at all because he believes conservative should be allowed to spread lies without repercussions.

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Dickens returned with a more wide-ranging ref-working in an Oct. 1 post:

Tonight’s VP debate, between GOP nominee J.D. Vance and Democratic nominee Tim Walz comes on the heels of a months-long media assault on Vance contrasted with a friendly sales-pitch of Walz.
The contrast couldn’t be more stark in how the two were greeted into the 2024 race.
Walz has been sold to the American public as a “moderate” “folksy” “football coach” with “rural roots.”
On the other hand, Vance has been depicted as a “weird” and “dangerous” anti-women candidate who “believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity.” The media even judo-flipped Vance’s criticism of Walz’s “stolen valor” story by actually questioning his service, instead.
The following are the most egregious examples of leftist journalists and celebrities eviscerating Vance while whipping up excitement for Walz since the two VP candidates were nominated:

Note that Dickens couldn’t be bothered to document the anti-Walz bias on Fox News and other right-wing channels. Just before the debate, Nicholas Fondacaro lashed out at a commentator who dared to criticize Vance:

How worried were Democrats that Ohio Senator J.D. Vance (R) was going to mop the floor with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) in the vice presidential debate Tuesday night? Well, in the run up to the event, CNN’s Democrats were seriously arguing that a Vance win would actually be a bad thing because he would come off as “predatory,” while Walz would be “constrained by his desire to be a unifier.”
Former Obama adviser turned CNN talking head, David Axelrod admitted that former President Trump picked Vance to be his “designated hitter” and that Vance was good a moments like this. “Donald Trump is a casting director, and he was convinced he would be good on TV for him, and this debate is obviously the most important television appearance there is,” he said.
But according to Axelrod, Vance would come off looking “predatory” like a vicious coyote ripping at an innocent Labrador:
[…]
Far-left political activist Van Jones warned that “J.D. Vance is dangerous to debate” because he’s a “phony” person:
Look, I think J.D. Vance is dangerous to debate. First of all, you don’t know which J.D. Vance you’re going to get. He’s such a phony that he could either be the phony Appalachia guy or he could be the kind of suck up that he was to get a job with Donald Trump.
Of course, he omitted that Walz has been credibly accused of stolen valor for lying about going off to war while he abandoned his unit before they deployed.

The whole “stolen valor” thing is just misleading right-wing talking points the MRC is obligated to parrot as a member of the Trump Regime Media.

Post-debate rah-rah

After the debate, it was all rah-rah for J.D. Vance and atatcks on anyone who thought Tim Walz did well. Tom Olohan kicked off the Vance rah-rah:

When CBS News moderators harped on the events of Jan. 6, Republican 2024 vice presidential nominee JD Vance (R-OH) came out swinging, addressing a real threat to democracy: the assault by Big Tech and the left on Americans’ First Amendment rights.
During Tuesday night’s 2024 Vice Presidential Debate candidates Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) covered a host of topics including questions on immigration, abortion, child care, health care, immigration and Iran’s recent attack on America’s ally Israel. However, Vance also spoke up about the dire state of Americans’ free speech rights. “I believe we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country, but unfortunately it’s not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about,” Vance said. “It is the threat of censorship.
Vance proceeded to blast Harris and Big Tech companies for their abysmal pro-censorship record. “It’s big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens. And it’s Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in misinformation,” Vance said. “I think that’s a much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen in this country in the last four years in the last 40 years.”

Olohan didn’t explain how correcting lies and misinformation — which is what “Big Tech” is actually being accused of doing — is “censorship.”

Nicholas Fonadacaro predictably slid back into work-the-refs mode, whining that moderators (gasp!) fact-checked Vance:

While objectively not as bad a ABC’s presidential debate three weeks ago, which should go down as the worst debate performance by the moderators in U.S. history, CBS’s vice presidential debate Tuesday night didn’t fare much better. Liberal moderators Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell were so desperate to make Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) look bad, that they repeatedly broke the rules of the debate to fact-check him. And their so-called fact-checks were so wrong that Vance had to call them out for it.
That’s not to mention the completely slanted and combative questions flung at the Republican vice presidential nominee.
[…]
Things came to a head when Brennan delivered a dubious fact-check overlooking how the asylum process was being abused by illegal immigrants. Vance spoke up to lay out the real facts of how the system was being manipulated, ultimately leading to O’Donnell to cutting off his microphone [.]

Fondacaro refused to identify what, exactly, was “dubious” about that fact-check. Then, again, the MRC has heartily cheered Vance’s lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, which is what the fact-check was centered on. Instead, he concluded that “despite essentially going up against three opponents much like Trump did, Vance still seemed to have pulled off a W.”

Despite that predictable rah-rah from Fondacaro, Jorge Bonilla declared it “PREDICTABLE” that MSNBC praised Walz’s performance:

The easiest prediction to make in light of the last couple of days of Regime Media expectation setting and Harris talking point-echoing was that, after proclaiming Minnesota Governor and Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz would virtually soil himself on the debate stage, they’d turn around and proclaim him the winner.
This prediction was made tongue-in-cheek, but we turned out to be right.
MSNBC, the most Harris-sycophantic cable news outlet, came through. Here is MSNBC anchor and Russia Hoax disseminator Rachel Maddow doing her Regime Media best to prop Walz up:

Bonilla offered no specific example of Walz “virtually soil[ing] himself on the debate stage,” so his declaration to be “right” is more than a little faulty. Still, he ranted about “Regime Media spin and bootlicking,” as if he and Fondacaro aren’t engaging in bootlicking for the Trump regime they so desperately wish for.

Speaking of which, Fondacaro returned for more bootlicking:

As a recent NewsBusters study shown, ABC News was 100 percent in the tank for the Harris-Walz campaign. So, it was no surprise that during the network’s analysis of the vice presidential debate hosted by CBS on Tuesday, that their journalists would largely stay away from admitting that Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) had a pretty bad performance between his lies about being in Tiananmen Square, his gaffe about being friends with school shooters, and many more.
But without getting into those details, chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl admitted it didn’t go well for the number two on their Democratic ticket.

Clay Waters also whined that Vance was fact-checked:

Barron-Lopez embraced pro-Democratic journalistic “fact-checking” and defended the partisan fact-checking at last month’s ABC presidential debate, claiming “ABC’s way of doing it was a bit more beneficial to the American public.” She also fiercely defended CBS violating its own debate rules by breaking in twice last night to fact-check Vance.
After Vance had talked about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, moderator Margaret Brennan felt compelled to jump in.
CBS’s Margaret Brennan: “And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, Temprary Protected Status.”
But when O’Donnell tried to pivot to the economy, Vance challenged Brennan on her fact-check, which he noted accurately was against the agreed-upon debate rules. So much for those rules.

This biased narrative-pushing continued throughout the MRC’s post-debate coverage:

And, of course, Graham whined that the moderators ignored the MRC’s biased questions:

Our expectations were pretty low when Alex Christy listed 30 questions the CBS moderators should ask Tim Walz and J.D. Vance. But they asked none of our suggested questions. The topics came up between the candidates, but no questions.
The closest they came was on the national debt, a topic usually too boring for network TV to consider. Alex suggested: “Since the last debate it was reported that interest payments on the debt topped $1 trillion per year for the first time. How do you and Harris plan to tackle the national debt without serious spending reforms?”
They did ask both candidates about their proposals “ballooning” the deficit. Norah O’Donnell asked Walz: “The Wharton School says your proposals will increase the nation’s deficit by $1.2 trillion. How would you pay for that without ballooning the deficit?”
[…]
Moderators in both presidential debates focused on abortion, and it happened again in the VP debate. Why is this in every debate? Let’s guess because Democrats think this is a great issue for them. Alex suggested this framing to Walz:
Why did you sign a law that ended the requirement that babies who survived abortions be given life-saving medical care?
That’s way too severe a tone for Democrats. Margaret Brennan offered a version of that: “After Roe v. Wade was overturned, you signed a bill into law that made Minnesota one of the least restrictive states in the nation when it comes to abortion. Former President Trump said in the last debate that. You believe abortion, quote, in the 9th month is absolutely fine. Yes or no? Is that what you support? “

Graham also touted how “We suggested Vance be asked about Trump moderating the Republican platform’s abortion language for a federal limit on abortions” — but the MRC has largely refused to publicly denounce Trump for that moderation.

Graham touted his “list of Tim Walz lies about his biography,” but didn’t mention that his co-workers cheered Vance’s lies about Haitians in Springfield.

The MRC's Debate Histrionics, Part 2

The Media Research Center served up its usual ref-working and pro-Republican rah-rah about the vice presidential debate, raging that the moderators dared to fact-check J.D. Vance.

Post-debate rah-rah

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