The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham is such a terrible media critic that he’s now invoking TV Tropes.
In a June 7 post, Graham complained that the Washington Post is sponsoring a screening of a film about “radical-left columnist” Molly Ivins at a local film festival. Needless to say, Graham offered no evidence Ivins was “radical-left”; instead, he complained about the satirical barbs she sent the way of conservatives of her time. Which brought us to this statement:
The trailer hailing her as the cliched voice of the voiceless also features Ivins mocking Newt Gingrich as the “draft-dodging, dope-smoking deadbeat dad who divorced his dying wife.” That’s infected with some fake news, as the Post‘s own Paul Farhi noted in 2011: “[Jackie] Battley wasn’t dying at the time of the hospital visit; she is alive today.”
On TV Tropes, this is called “I Take Offense to That Last One!” In other words, Graham is apparently conceding the accuracy of the whole “draft-dodging, dope-smoking deadbeat dad” part of Ivins’ quip.
But the last item is also not as false as Graham would have you believe. According to the Farhi article he’s referencing, Battley did say that Gingrich did insist on discussing divorce in the hospital, where she was recovering from a surgery to remove a benign tumor — the third surgery in a treatment for uterine cancer — reportedly to sign off on a list of items related to the divorce. While not actually dying, she was seriously ill.
But Graham doesn’t want you to think that Gingrich is that terrible of a person, apparently. Or that Ivins, by being mostly factual, wasn’t so “radical-left” as he wants you to think she is.