Conservatives have to distract from the impeachment inquiry of President Trump. That must mean it’s time for the Media Research Center to count things.
The MRC was ON IT back in September by counting the number of times that media outlets discussing possible impeachable offenses by Trump used the word “impeachment”:
- Network Morning Shows Hype Trump Impeachment 17 Times
- OBSESSED: Nets Bang Impeachment Drum 73 Times in a Day
Yet, apparently, counting the number of times a certain word is used is somehow not an obsession.
Scott Whitlock turned in that old MRC staple, the stopwatch count, in a strategically boldfaced Oct. 1 post:
In just ten days (September 20 through September 30) the broadcast networks overwhelmed their evening and morning shows with more than 7 hours of coverage devoted to a whistleblower’s complaint about President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the ensuing calls for impeachment.
Only 46 minutes of that coverage referenced Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal with a Ukranian company. Even when networks mentioned Trump’s concern about Hunter benefiting from his father’s status as Vice President, they were quick to dismiss the allegations with the refrain: “no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
Jump ahead to this month, and the MRC’s Nicholas Fondacaro went into full Depiction-Equals-Approval Fallacy mode — in an echo of its insistence that the “liberal media” is acting as stenographers for Democrats, a claim that reads like the MRC is taking stenography from the Trump White House — baselessly portraying news reports noting that Nancy Pelosi had decided to call Trump’s quid pro quo to Ukraine “bribery” as an endorsement of the term and of Trump’s impeachment in general:
At a Thursday press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) essentially authorized the use of the word “bribery” to describe President Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine. The broadcast networks gushed about her use of the word and showed their approval by roundly noting that bribery was an impeachable offense explicitly laid out in the Constitution.
[…]Perhaps “bribery” should be added to the list of shared talking points between the media and Democratic Party.
Kyle Drennen followed up with a body-count piece, headlined “Nets Follow Pelosi Marching Orders: ‘Bribery’ Mentioned 43 Times.” He insisted that every single mention of the word — no, really, “all of it” — was “designed to boost the impeachment crusade against Trump.” He also claimed that “journalists seem to be just as eager as partisan Democrats to throw around the serious criminal charge without any substantiation,” even though the quid pro quo Trump is alleged to have engaged in with Ukraine is a form of bribery.