The Media Research Center is not going to let a little thing like lack of evidence keep it from blaming Antifa for recent unrest, just as President Trump instructed it to do. Tim Graham took his shot in a June 25 post complaining that a Washington Post op-ed pointing out that inconvenient fact, as well as giving Trump a four-Pinocchio rating for blaming Antifa. As a lazy “media researcher,” Graham can’t be bothered to disprove the Post,so he tries to insult it instead:
Perhaps we could suggest that left-wing “news” sites could try to investigate Antifa and identify their activities with one-hundredth the ardor they chase after tiny factions of Klansmen. Instead, we get octopus-ink articles claiming Antifa is formless, shapeless, and blameless.
Graham further displayed his immaturity by feeling the need to mock the name of the Post’s op-ed writer, a German university professor named Curd Knupfer, tossing out the juvenile insult of “Cheesy Curd.” Graham also describes Knufer as a “leftist” but provided no evidence to back up his claim, unless he’s assuming that anyone who researches the content of right-wing media is automatically “leftist” by definition.
Despite being, again, a lazy researcher, Graham felt the need to attack Knupfer’s valid research method of using software to “scrape” Antifa-related articles from right-wing websites: “‘Scraped’ the articles? Does that mean someone actually read them? Or just used crude computer analytics? Why are the leftists to averse to actually reading when they analyze media?”
Graham got further enraged when Knupfer pointed out that these right-wing websites spoke of Antifa only in vagure terms and never quoted anyone identifying themselves with the group:
Dear Curd: This might be a little tough when they dress up in black masks and don’t hand out business cards. Black-bloc hooligans are more likely to beat on camera crews than do interviews. Clearly, this man thinks negative writing about Antifa somehow fits into a framework of “criminalizing dissent.” Instead of, say, criminalizing criminal activity, like vandalism and fighting cops.
The MRC, meanwhile, designs its “media research” methodologies to further its right-wing anti-media narrative rather than to conform to accepted research standards, so maybe Graham doesn’t have a lot of moral standing to criticize Knupfer, who — unlike anyone who works at the MRC — is a trained and experienced academic researcher.