It wouldn’t be the Media Research Center if it wasn’t trying to exploit last weekend’s massacre to push its anti-media agenda, and it lives down to that.
When CNN announced it would host a townhall later this week like it did after the Parkland massacre in 2017, the MRC’s Nicholas Fondacaro went unhinged — after all, a big part of the MRC’s anti-media narrative is to attack CNN at every possible opportunity. “CNN Announces New Anti-Gun Show Trial, Hosted By Antifa Backer,” he sneered in the headline of an Aug. 5 piece. He whined:
The victims of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings were set to become the next soapbox for CNN to stand on and shout at Second Amendment supporting Americans. On Monday, CNN announced they will host yet another anti-gun town hall on Wednesday to emotionally exploit grieving families. If that wasn’t slimy enough, the town hall was going to be moderated by Prime Time host and Antifa supporter Chris Cuomo.
[…]The last time CNN hosted one of these town halls, for the school shooting Parkland, Florida, it immediately degenerated into a show trial with “moderator” Jake Tapper sitting back while loudmouth students assailed Republican Senator Marco Rubio (FL) and then-NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch.
Really, Fondacaro was just mad that pro-gun activists like Loesch were in the unusual position of being criticized to their faces. In his post on that townhall, Fondacaro attacked Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky with pejoratives, claiming he “smeared” and “spat” and “browbeat” and “chided” — seemingly obliviious to the fact that he had just survived a massacre and arguably earned the right to be a tad upset. Fondacaro huffed at the end of his post: “This is CNN. No objectivity. Just a naked ratings grab and gun ban push.”
But Fondacaro wasn’t done pre-ranting about the upcoming townhall. He then aimed his venom at the moderator, Chris Cuomo:
The other disgusting thing about CNN hosting this new town hall was the fact that the “moderator” was going to be Chris Cuomo. He’s the same CNN host that insisted last year that the left-wing terrorist group known as Antifa was “morally” superior. He also equated the terrorists with the soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy in WWII.
“There’s a lot of about what-aboutism and spin going on. And it’s kind of sickening to me,” Cuomo argued, “But I argue to you tonight, all punches are not equal morally.” He would go on to suggest that there was no “moral equivalent” between Antifa and those they were targeting. “And in a clash between hate and those who oppose it, those who oppose it are on the side of right,” he proclaimed.
Fondacaro is deliberately taking Cuomo’s words out of context to suggest that Cuomo supports recent violent events involving Antifa, which Cuomo has not said he supported (something Fondacaro undoubtedly knows). As the link supplied by Fondacaro shows, Cuomo was speaking about Antifa activists at an alt-right “Unite the Right” rally last year who, the MRC gleefully reported, attacked an NBC reporter covering it. (Funny how the MRC cares only about a journalist’s safety when non-conservatives are inciting violence against them.) Weirdly, Fondacaro offered no condemnation at all of the alt-right neo-Nazis who created the rally that Antifa was protesting in the first place — you know, kind of like the person who perpetrated the El Paso massacre. Does his silence equal approval? You be the judge.
Needless to say, Fondacaro’s boss, Brent Bozell, is fully on board with this unhinged hate, puling his own publicity stunt to call the townhall “a partisan political ratings stunt” that will “politicize this tragedy for ratings.” As if Bozell isn’t going to be all over right-wing media in the next 24 hours screeching these attacks and bashing the townhall afterwards no matter what actually happened during it.
To paraphrase Fondacaro: This is the MRC — not letting a couple dozen murders get in the way of getting on Fox News to push its anti-media narrative.