The Media Research Center has long been cravenly callous about the safety of journalists, smearing them as whiners when they note the threatening behavior they receive whenever President Trump attacks the media for not being completely fawning — it even suggested that journalists ought to feel threatened for not being Trump sycophants. Yet the MRC has the temerity to complain when this is pointed out.
Thus, we have a June 29 post from Tim Graham, who whined that “Brian Stelter lamented that Facebook was “radicalizing” people with allowing all this divisive speech on its platform. Then he welcomed on longtime PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers, who suggested it was a popular T-shirt at Trump rallies to suggest journalists should be lynched.”
When Moyers stated that the sparse crowd at Trump’s Tulsa rally wasn’t “engaged” until he attacked a reporter, Graham huffed in response: “WRONG. First, Trump mocked a supposed CNN reporter in minute 12, and the crowd was passionate before that. Second, he was mocking “the CNN anchor, you know, did a little shave job on the head…standing in front of a burning building, saying things are very peaceful here.” That’s not female, and not even CNN: it was MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.”
After conceding that Trump got the network of the CNN reporter wrong, Graham then smeared Moyers as suffereing from old-age dementia, claiming he was “stumbling through false claims at age 86.”
Moyers then claimed that a “popular T-shirt out in the Trump rallies” reads “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly Required,” Graham lost it again: “Stelter didn’t ask for any evidence for this smear, that this awful T-shirt is “popular.” He just said “Thank you very much. Great to hear your insight.” No time for fact checks!
Well, Graham had time for fact-checks, and he performed none, failing to disprove Moyers’ claim. The shirt is certainly popular enough that people wear it on airplanes — and, yes, it has been seen at Trump rallies.
Graham gets paid well to try and destroy journalists for failing to be good Trump-bots like himself, and then he gets mad when people point out that his virluent hatred of journalists has a logical extension — which, by the way, he ever explicitly says he’s opposed to, even as his headline screams that “Stelter Sets Up Moyers to Smear Trump Fans as Wanting Reporters DEAD.”
Such is life at the MRC these days.