The MRC's Right-Wing Narratives Fall Apart
Every time its narratives on Donald Trump, Joe Biden and election conspiracy theories get called out for being bogus, the Media Research Center engages in fits of loud whining.
The Media Research Center just hates it when its right-wing narratives get called out for being misleading or outright false.
The anti-Biden activists at the MRC unsurprisingly pounced on a video of President Biden at the G-7 summit in Japan that made it look he was aimlessly wandering off — and was in denial that the video was deceptive. Tim Graham grumbled on his June 14 podcast:
Anti-Biden social-media accounts shared video of Joe Biden turning around and seemingly wandering off at the G-7 summit, and the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni worked to turn him around like Jill Biden does. The pro-Biden media were furious that the “Murdoch Media” was spreading this clip mocking the “Meander In Chief.” (That was the New York Post headline.)
The “mainstream” crew pro-Biden media acts like a journalistic Secret Service, protecting the reputation of Democrats from a negative narrative.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe struck its usual Downward Facing Dog yoga pose, attacking “cheap fakes” and “vicious lies,” as if the video was fake news: “Even critics were saying that he did a strong job, very good job representing the United States,” they claimed. This is the same program where Scarborough said “F-you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever!”
The Stelteresque reporters at the Daily Beast had the headline “White House Rips Desperate Murdoch Press Over Deceptive Biden Video.” They were just promoting the tweets of press aide Andrew Bates and going after this idea that Murdoch media – like the Wall Street Journal article on Biden Slipping – are pushing fake news that Biden’s a geezer doing too much geez-ing[.]
What Graham doesn’t do, however, is admit those critics were right — as a real news organization pointed out, Biden did wander … but to give a thumbs-up to a group of paratroopers preparing their parachutes, meaning that video was in fact deceptively edited. But the MRC had its narrative and it needed to defend it, no matter how false it is.
When MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called such deceptive videos “cheap fakes,” Mark Finkelstein whined in a June 17 post: “The funny part came came when Joe Scarborough attacked Trump’s “right-wing stooges” for suggesting Biden’s mentally failing. As if Scarborough isn’t a stooge for Biden, angrily arguing Biden’s the sharpest he’s ever been?” Finkelstein didn’t admit the deceptive nature of the video.
P.J. Gladnick defended the deceptive video in a June 18 post:
The Democrats and their media allies now have a new shtick. If they find a video to be embarrassing, especially videos revealing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, they now pretend they are really “deepfakes” and “cheap fakes.”
On the CNBC afternoon show The Exchange on Monday, anchor Kelly Evans previewed a segment with current CNBC contributor and former Democrat Senator Heidi Heitkamp: “The rise of AI-generated deepfakes is on the rise ahead of this November’s election. Is it too late for Congress to regulate the industry?”
Evans put on screen the video revealing Joe Biden turning around and wandering a few steps away during a skydiving exhibition at the G-7 meeting in Italy. Watch the two versions of the video in which the CNBC host and contributor desperately want you to believe the first is a mere AI fake despite the fact that the second video shot at a different angle also shows Biden wandering away from the rest of the group.
[…]
So what they call the “real video” showed exactly the same scene but at a different angle from what Evans and Heitkamp are suggesting was an AI fake video in the first clip presented. It’s not just that Biden turns around, but that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni moved quite quickly in both videos to retrieve the wandering Biden.
It’s hard to believe that Evans and Heitkamp think the viewers could be fooled by their explanation but their extreme gaslighting does reveal the level of their desperation to salvage Biden.
Gladnick censored the fact that Biden interacted with paratroopers. Looks like he’s the one who’s gaslighting.
Joege Bonilla whined in a June 19 post that the non-right-wing media, by reporting what actually happened, was “adopt[ing] The White House’s ‘cheap fakes’ talking point as they try to wish this story away.” He then tried to spin the accurate video as still showing something bad:
We must begin by fact-checking the fact-check, which tries to negate claims that Biden wandered off by explaining that he was simply talking to the parachutists that had performed their exhibition at the G7. Biden wandered away from a group photo, and the Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is clearly seen making her way through the crowd and wrangling Biden back into the photo. This set of facts is not in dispute.
Curtis Houck ran to Fox News (where of course, no guest with a diverging opinion was allowed) to rant about the situation, though he didn’t discuss the G-7 video specifically, let alone admit that the preferred right-wing clip of it was deceptive:
Late Tuesday on the Fox News Channel’s Fox News @ Night, NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck joined fill-in host Kevin Corke and fellow panelist Amber Duke of The Spectator to lay waste to the full-court press by the Biden administration to label raw, unedited videos illustrating President Biden’s cognitive decline as deep fakes, “cheap fakes”, and part of a far-right disinformation campaign.
Catherine Salgado attached the MRC’s dishonest “censorship” narrative to discussion of the video in a June 18 post:
A Biden campaign spokeswoman went on MSNBC to whine that more censorship is necessary to protect Democrat Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election.
When Biden was caught on video disorientedly ambling away from other G7 leaders in Italy, only to be stopped and redirected by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the video quickly went viral online. Biden supporters are now claiming the video was taken out of context. Biden campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod went on MSNBC to suggest the video’s virality shows a need for more suppression of speech online.
“Disinformation is alive and well,” Elrod intoned. She tried to play up Biden as a patriotic leader without addressing the president’s clear confusion and habitual wandering. “Biden was out there literally representing America at the G7, saluting our troops, you know, doing what he does as president of the United States.”
She then made a rambling demand for increased suppression of free speech: “Look, we’re gonna see more of this. I mean, this is just the reality of campaigning in 2024. So we have to combat that disinformation. We have to hit it hard when it happens and make it clear that these are dirty tactics that MAGA Republicans are using because they can’t run on the issues.”
Without explaining how it’s “disinformation” to show authentic clips of Biden messing up, Elrod called on Big Tech, “surrogates” and the media to endorse her calls for increased censorship.
If that video was deceptive, it cannot possibly be “authentic” if other authentic clips discredit it. Salgado wouldn’t admit that the right-wing-preferred video omitted the paratroopers Biden was interacting with.
Graham returned to whine further in his June 19 column:
Start with a video from a skydiving demonstration at the G-7 summit in Italy. Biden appeared to be wandering away from European leaders to look at something behind him. It turns out he was giving two thumbs-up to a skydiver behind him. But what everyone saw was the leaders of Italy and France trying to discreetly rush and turn Biden around for photographs. It looked like they had “orders” to keep Grandpa on track.
PolitiFact claimed it was “False” to say Biden “wandered off” (the cheeky New York Post headline was “Meander In Chief”). Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler’s article carried the hot headline “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead.” Kessler could have awarded Two Pinocchios (“Significant omissions and/or exaggerations”) but careened into ruling Four Pinocchios, for “Whoppers.” This isn’t fact-checking. It’s spin-spoiling.
“Morning Joe” spent several days raging against the G-7 video, with Mika Brzezinski quoting a distraught Democrat strategist: “The lie sprinting the 100-meter dash and the fact check is taking a stroll on the beach.” Watching European leaders try to “rescue” Biden from meandering is now a “lie.”
Again, Graham refused to admit that the right-wing-preferred clip omitted the paratroopers Biden interacted with — the factual basis of the “cheapfake” criticism — meaning that the critics were right.
Bill D’Agostino did his own reframing in another June 19 post:
One of the videos in question shows Biden seemingly wandering off during the G7 summit while walking with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The video appears to have been shot vertically on a smartphone, which makes it hard to tell that he was actually walking over to talk to a paratrooper just off-screen. At least, that’s what the White House claims.
But to claim that this supposed lack of context renders the entire video “fake” is insanely dishonest. It’s not like it was doctored or AI-generated. The vertical framing of the video may exclude some context, but it doesn’t change the fact that the President got distracted and wandered over to talk to somebody while he was supposed to be speaking with Meloni.
Given that the preferred right-wing-promoted cut didn’t include the paratroopers, it discredits those right-wingers to push a discredited narrative based on it — and it gives people credible license to criticize the Biden-is-senile narrative and reason to criticize other videos. But D’Agostino and his fellow MRCers were too committed to the narrative to admit it was discredited and were desperate to reframe the full, unedited video as supporting that narrative. Mary Clare Waldron did something similar in a June 20 post:
Again, many of these videos deemed “fake” by CNN simply highlight a major issue among voters, and more than age, the problem is capability. Yes, both Trump and Biden are older, that is not the issue, as both are not equally capable.
Bonilla repeated his narrative again in a June 21 post: “Biden did meander at the G7. Biden walked away from a staged photo-op in order to talk to the skydivers. Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni wrangled Biden back into the picture, moving some prime ministers around in the process.” But Bonilla ignored that the right-wing-preferred video deceptively portrayed Biden as wandering off to nowhere, and he will never admit that dishonesty.
2020 election fraud conspiracy theory
The MRC is not about to let go of its 2020 election fraud conspiracy theory anytime soon. Graham huffed in a June 24 post:
It’s still self-evident that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election “in a landslide” as he claimed, so that was obvious terrain for a “fact checker.” But the pro-Biden media can’t stop imagining that Trump’s going to lose in 2024, and they’re accusing the right-wingers of mangling facts in advance.
On Thursday’s PBS News Hour, co-host Geoff Bennett led off the show promoting a segment on “how Republican disinformation is sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2024 election.” Later, Bennett introduced a segment from Laura Barron-Lopez: “It’s been more than three years since baseless claims about a rigged 2020 election inspired an attack on the U.S. Capitol, but the lies have not stopped.”
She played a clip of Trump: “The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, and we’re not going to let them rig the presidential election in 2024.”
Where is the “lie” in that? It’s one thing to say Trump “won,” and it is another to say it was “rigged.” The media certainly did their best to “rig” it by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop, and blaming every Covid death on Trump, and claiming in their “fact checks” that Trump was wrong to say a vaccine was almost ready.
Lots of misleading words, scare quotes and false conflation here. Note that Graham doesn’t explicitly state that Trump was lying about winning the election, only about his exaggerated claim that he won by a “landslide” — he has to keep that argument open to further right-wing election disinformation this year, which he deflects from by playing 2020 whataboutism.
Note also that Graham will never admit that there were good reasons to question the laptop story — it did, in fact, look like Russian disinformation, and the newspaper that put the story out, the New York Post, is a right-wing pro-Trump rag that is not above spreading Russian disinformation, which was compounded by the fact that the Post offered no independent verification of the laptop, making it look even more sketchy. He’s also being overbroad by claiming that “the media” suppressed the laptop when he really means non-right-wing media who offered reasonable skepticism given the lack of verification, as opposed to right-wing outlets like Fox News and the MRC who asked no questions because the story fit their anti-Biden narratives.
Graham complaining that “the media” was “blaming every Covid death on Trump” is hypocritical because his MRC is running that same playbook against Biden by solely blaming him for inflation. (Also, there is the matter of Trump mismanaging the pandemic in a way that did, in fact, result in more deaths.) Similarly, his complaint that “Trump was wrong to say a vaccine was almost ready” ignores the fact that Trump crassly turned work on a vaccine into an election promise.
Graham then whined that Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld was fact-checked:
Then she added Fox News: “Much like last time, the former president has help from right-wing media.” A clip of The Five from June 13 followed. Greg Gutfeld said: “What is up the Dems’ sleeve to drag that body back into the White House?” Since Trump is considered likely to win at this point, “then what do you do after you win? How do you convince anyone that’s real? Have they even thought of that? Like, even the Dems behind the scenes better hope he doesn’t win, because no one’s going to believe it.”
She left out the part where Gutfeld called Biden a “feeble ghost.” They could fact-check the “ghost” part.
Graham didn’t mention that the MRC refuses to evaluate Gutfeld even as it regularly attacks other late-night hosts. One might say that PBS was doing a job that the MRC won’t. He whined further with a personal attack on a fact-checker:
To “fact check” this, PBS brought on David Becker of the “nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research. Becker worked for the leftist group People for The American Way. He always insists the 2020 election was the most wonderful, un-rigged election of all time. In addition, he co-wrote a book called The Big Truth with CBS reporter Major Garrett which imagined the outbreak of civil war in 2023. So let’s put aside the “nonpartisan” thing…and the “fact check” thing.
Barron-Lopez asked him to “debunk” Gutfeld, saying he warned of “shenanigans.” That came on June 14: “if you somehow pull this out with some kind of shenanigans, I hate to use that word so lightly, but shenanigans, you’re going to deal with the public who doesn’t buy the election.” Becker unloaded his spiel about how the 2024 election will be super-fair. He wasn’t asked about the “civil war in 2023” thing.
LBL then underlined how the right-wingers are historically awful: “That spreading of disinformation by Republican politicians, Americans across social media, and right-wing media, is it worse this election cycle than previous cycles?” Of course he said yes.
Graham doesn’t deny that his fellow right-wingers are spreading disinformation — only that it was called out. He concluded with, yes, more disinformation:
She also suggested “There’s another big election conspiracy theory being spread by Republicans right now.” That’s the claim that non-citizens are being registered to vote. Again, she cited a Fox News report that 49 states are providing voter registration forms to migrants at government offices without requiring proof of citizenship. Becker “debunked” this by claiming “We know that very, very few, if any noncitizens ever actually vote.”
Not only do very few noncitizens actually vote, it’s almost impossible to casually do so. First off, it’s already illegal; second, states do check voting rolls against other data to make sure people not eligible to vote do not. That makes it irrelevant whether “migrants” are given a form to fill out since it’s highly unlikely that a completed form will survive the vetting process. Graham, of course, is simply advancing dubious right-wing fearmongering about scary brown people.
Trump martyr narrative
After spending a lot of time blaming liberals for the assassination attempt on Donald Trump despite having no evidence whatsoever to prove it, the MRC moved on to the next step: complaining that the attempt by Trump and Republicans to build a martyr narrative around the shooting going into the Republican National Convention was being called out. Sarah Butler wrote in a July 15 post:
On Monday, CNN Newsroom Jim Acosta hosted Michael Gold, political correspondent for The New York Times. Unsurprisingly, both downplayed former President Donald Trumps attempted assassination and whine that people think he was “saved by God.”
Acosta began the segment by stating “obviously, there have been calls for unity and civility” following the recent assassination attempt. Gold quickly responded that Trump “has been calling for unity at his rallies” but claimed that Trump only says that to “people who already follow him” not the whole country.
Gold went on to complain that the Republican National Convention, which has different themes each night, will include “themes [that] are largely attacking President Biden.”
Desperately attempting to create sympathy for democrats, Gold added that “unity merges with the need to set the tone for the rest of the race and that tone is going to be a pretty negative one for Democrats.”
Acosta then asked Gold what he thought about the narrative of Trump being a “savior” to the country. “A lot of what you’re seeing on social media, a lot of what some of the former president’s allies are saying is that they’re seeing the fact that he was able to survive this assassination attempt as almost, like, a religious event that he was saved by God,” he scoffed.
Nicholas Fondacaro similarly groused:
Not long after the assassination attempt on former President Trump, MSNBC host Joy Reid made her X account private over the weekend, possibly to hide the incendiary anti-Rhetoric she spewed for years. So, the network’s Monday night coverage of the night one of the Republican National Convention was Reid first public comments on the shooting. Of course, they were vile. She expressed her “fear” that Trump would be allowed to “rewrite himself” as “a victim” because he was shot in the head.
Claiming she spoke to “civilians” and “professionals,” Reid suggested there was a “deep concern” and “fear” that the “media writ large…will acquiesce to trying to convince people that the things they have been experiencing for the last five, six years didn’t happen.”
Reid proclaimed that the media need to be “the guardians of memory” and not allow Trump to “rewrite himself as both a hero and a victim” after surviving an assassin’s bullet passing through is right ear. She argued that Trump should be viewed as a victim because he was supposedly “the greatest purveyor and promoter of political violence really, you know, since anyone can remember, since George Wallace.”
A few minutes later, Reid essentially suggested the assassination attempt was Trump experiencing the boomeranging of the political violence he caused:
Fondacaro repeated his libelously false claim that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow “inspired the congressional baseball shooter who tried to assassinate multiple Republicans” — a claim he has never backed up.
Fondacaro returned for a July 16 post whining that it was pointed out how Trump’s bandaged ear was turning into a prop:
An utter lack of class was on full display on MSNBC Tuesday night as they were kicking off their coverage of Night Two of the Republican National Convention. In his opening monologue for The Beat, host Ari Melber suggested that former President Trump’s bandaged ear – injured after he was shot in the head during a failed assassination attempt – was “a prop” and “a spectacle” being “mine[d]” by Republicans purely for political purposes.
Melber’s rant started off respectful enough. He described Trump’s arrival on the convention floor Monday night a “stark proof-of-life moment.” “And the reality is, this is a human being who was almost shot to death on live TV in front of his supporters and family this weekend,” he stated.
But things immediately took a turn when he added that it was “also showmanship by a politician known for his mastery of what they call unscripted reality TV.” He highlighted the ramblings of New York Times chief TV critic James Ponewozik, who said Trump’s bandaged ear was “a prop”:
But RNC delegates were, in fact, wearing their own prop bandages purely for political purposes. Wasn’t that the actual lack of class? Or is Fondacaro too much of Trump toady to recognize that fact?
Right-wing education changes
The MRC managed this year to restrain the meltdowns it has had in previous years over the establishment of Juneteenth as an official holiday, but Alex Christy did try to invoke it in a coverage complaint in a June 20 post:
PBS’s Christiane Amanpour likes to say that journalists should be “truthful, not neutral,” but a common theme of Amanpour and Company is that her commitment to the truth only goes one way. For Wednesday’s Juneteenth show, Amanpour claimed that Donald Trump’s presidency and the Supreme Court represent “hurdles” to racial equality, while her guest, Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director Bryan Stevenson, claimed that some states are making it illegal to learn about the history of racial injustice in America.
[…]
Later in his reply, he recalled that “Now in Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones placed next to the homes of people who were killed during the Holocaust. There’s a landscape that is trying to reckon with the horrors of that. Every student in Germany is required to study the Holocaust. You can’t graduate without that.”
Attempting to contrast that with America, he claimed, “But here in the United States, we have states passing laws trying to make it illegal, impermissible for people to study these histories, and that just speaks to the challenge that we face and so, we are in the middle of it, and we have a lot of work to do, which is why I am persuaded that we need an era of truth and justice, truth and repair, truth and restoration, truth telling about this history.”
That is false, and no matter how many times people like Stevenson repeat it, it will not suddenly become true. The progressive left does not own the legacy of abolitionism, just as Amanpour does not get to claim the mantle of truthfulness in journalism.
In fact, the entire point of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to rewrite black history courses in the state was to prohibit the teaching of certain things he didn’t like. the MRC, of course, ran to DeSantis’ defense, uncritically repeating his claims that he just wants real education and that the things he was banning were “woke” (whatever that means). But Christy doesn’t care about “truthfulness,” just about advancing the narrative, however factually flawed.