The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham spent a Dec. 29 post complaining that NBC “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd identified the chain of disinformation among right-wing websites, to which he responds with such talking points as “Journalists like Todd decry we can’t agree on “shared facts,” but so there are so many facts they can’t stand to discuss — take the Horowitz IG report — that it’s a one day story after three years of pushing Russian collusion.”
After Todd identified disinformation as “an ecosystem problem, at least on the right,” in which operations such as InfoWars and Gateway Pundit play a prominent role, Graham huffed in response: “There should be a devotion to facts and honesty in conservative media. Sites like ours have no interest in crackpot sites like InfoWars.”
It’s clear that Graham doesn’t read the site for which he serves as executive editor.
From repeating bogus, anonymously sourced claims and refusing to correct them to putting words in people’s mouths to outright lying to its readers, it’s clear that Graham is not imposing any “devotion to facts and honesty” at NewsBusters and the MRC.
Further, the MRC very much has an interest in sites like InfoWars — at least when they can be invoked as examples of how social media operations are supposedly censoring conservative speech. To cite a few examples from the past year or so:
- Corinne Weaver complained about Apple’s ban of “noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones” while purportedly refusing to “censor content that doesn’t fall in line with leftist groupthink.”
- In another post, she noted that “conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was permanently banned” as an example of “conservative, pro-Trump or anti-establishment figures on Twitter being punished for expressing their views, many of them well-known in their fields.”
- Alexander Hall promoted a documentary made by a colleague of far-right British Muslim-hater Tommy Robinson that “explore[s] five people who have been shut down and silenced on social media,” including Jones. Hall uncritically quoted Jones describing himself as “patient zero of the deplatforming epidemic.”
- Hall also uncritically touted a podcast host who was unhappy about “the deplatforming of Alex Jones” as a sign that “the far left is censoring and smearing centrists and the right on social media.”
- Weaver groused that CNN, “the outlet that successfully campaigned for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to be banned from almost all major social media platforms seemed to urge for more action from Twitter.” She linked to a 2018 post she wrote lamenting the ban.
- Weaver also worked up a conspiracy theory about Facebook’s ban on threats that she decided excluded those on the site’s “dangerous individuals” list, which includes Jones: “Theoretically, users could post content threatening to kill these individuals, and nothing would be done by the company.”
- Hall basically dared Dave Rubin, operator of a new social media site, not to ban “someone as controversial as Alex Jones and the InfoWars brand” despite being “personally offensive, but legal.”
Does this sound like an organization that has “no interest” in Jones and InfoWars? Perhaps Graham should explain.