The other day, we noted that the Media Research Center’s Tim Graham huffed that “Donald Trump correctly felt NBC reporter Katy Tur was hostile to him on the campaign trail.” While we looked at how the MRC appears to have helped Trump target Tur — which resulted in threats to Tur’s safety — there’s more to the story.
What launched Graham’s complaint was Tur pointing out how the intelligence community agrees that Russian hackers meddled in the U.S. presidential election with the apparent goal of getting Trump elected. That set off Graham, going once again into self-righteous media-bashing mode:
This is how the liberal media try to inflate their own authority and credibility. They use anonymous government sources and then insist that when you attack their ginned-up hit jobs, you’re undermining the government. What would it look like if the anonymous sources were publicly named, and the public could judge their political or career motives? The “intelligence community” could be Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, as many suspect, a Democrat appointee spinning for the Democrats right before the Electoral College votes. That’s why the anonymity can be a very secretive and dishonest tactic.
Funny, we don’t recall Graham or anyone else at the MRC demanding that Fox News reveal the anonymous government sources behind its pre-election claim that Hillary Clinton’s indictment was imminent — heck, rather than denouncing this “very secretive and dishonest tactic,” the MRC was demanding that the media report the story. And when Fox’s Bret Baier had to walk back his claim — thus, making it fake news a few days before the election — Graham and the MRC could not be bothered to issue a prominent correction, let alone apologize to its readers for promoting a fake story.
Graham can’t have possibly forgotten that just two months ago his employer was promoting fake news based on the “anonymous government sources” he now derides. He has simply tried to flush it down the memory hole and is hoping MRC readers don’t realize he’s a massive hypocrite.