The Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck wrote of the incident in which Idaho Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte allegedly assaulted Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs: “Importantly, any assault of anyone (reporter or non-reporter) isn’t okay. This should be common sense. That being said, the deranged reactions to the incident must be denounced too.”
Yes, that is important. Some of those deranged reactions, however, are coming from Houck’s higher-ups at the MRC — in which they seem to think the assault is quite OK — and Houck most certainly will not be called upon to denounce those.
MRC chief Brent Bozell tweeted: “Jacobs is an obnoxious, dishonest first class jerk. I’m not surprised he got smacked.”
Bozell didn’t mention that he has something of a past with Jacobs. In 2013, Jacobs — then a reporter for the Daily Beast — reported on the MRC’s legally questionable purchase of a house in Pennsylvania from MRC vice president David Martin. Jacobs was also among the reporters who highlighted the revelation that Bozell didn’t write his own syndicated columns.
The MRC’s Tim Graham — the guy who actually writes Bozell’s columns and belatedly got a co-author credit after the revelation surfaced — huffed in his own tweet: “Let’s ask why on Earth a House candidate in Montana should have to answer questions from a reporter for a BRITISH newspaper????”
Funny, we remember when Graham was more than happy to tout reporting from British newspapers on happenings in America. Also, the Guardian has operations in the U.S., and Jacobs is an American.
To his credit, Graham did tepidly concede in a later tweet that “It is wrong, and well, unusual, to apparently hurt a reporter’s elbow over a CBO score.” Then he whined: “But HOW is this a half-hour story on MSNBC???” As if Fox News wouldn’t have done the same thing — and the MRC wouldn’t have gone wall-to-wall on it — had Gianforte been a Democrat.
Indeed, as of this writing, CNSNews.com, the MRC’s “news” division, has done just a single story on it that was quickly relegated to a below-the-fold headline.