The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham was in fine whining mood in a Dec. 23 post, ranting that a Washington Post profile on Adam McKay, director of the new movie about Dick Cheney, “Vice,” was somehow another example of the paper publishing “the most embarrassing laudatory dreck supporting its favorite socialist elites,” because McKay considers himself a democratic socialist.
But it wasn’t enough for Graham to attack a newspaper or a person it featured. He then went needlessly personally attacked the article’s author, Jeff Weiss. Graham declared that “Weiss is such a socialist he posted a happy picture of himself posed with statues of his heroes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the Marx-Engels forum in Berlin, created under the East German communist regime.”
Graham apparently spent no small amount of time rooting through Weiss’ personal Instagram account until he found the photo. Graham provided no other evidence that Weiss is a “socialist” — indeed, Weiss’ Instragram feed shows him to be a music obsessive rather than a political ideologue — and seems to have discounted the possibility that Weiss was merely a tourist who posed ironically with the statues.
This is how terrible a media critic Graham is — he has to smear a journalist based on a single Instagram photo in order to own the Washington Post.