As part of its promotion of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against social media outlets for banning him, the Media Research Center also found time for a temper tantrum. When Axios blew up the MRC’s narrative by pointing out in an article on Trump’s lawsuit that “To date, Trump and other conservative critics have not presented any substantial evidence that either platform is biased against conservatives in its policies or implementation of them,” MRC chief Brent Bozell had a meltdown, as described in a July 7 item by Alexander Hall:
Bozell raked Axios over the coals by describing its coverage as “[b]latant lies from the leftist media.”
Free Speech America also scorched Axios for denying Big Tech censorship by summarizing some of the most infamous examples:
- Facebook and Twitter censored the Hunter Biden story and interfered in the 2020 election
- Trump’s banned on 10 Big Tech sites.
- Our http://CensorTrack.org database has already amassed more than 2,500 examples of censorship.
What Axios didn’t tell readers is that Facebook and Twitter don’t reveal how their algorithms work. So that restricts how conservatives can respond. But it is undeniable that both Facebook and Twitter did indeed censor the Hunter Biden story in the lead up to the 2020 election.
[…]A post-election poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, also sheds light on how censorship impacted our nation. The poll showed that 36 percent of Biden voters were NOT aware of the evidence linking then-presidential candidate Joe Biden to potentially corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter. Thirteen percent of these voters (or 4.6 percent of Biden’s total vote) said that had they known these facts, they would not have voted for the former Vice President.
The MRC won’t tell you that the Hunter Biden laptop story still has yet to be authoratatively substantiated, and it has been pushed by biased right-wing outlets like the MRC with a vested interest in personally destroying Hunter Biden and his father. Even Hall doesn’t buy the veracity of the story, admitting that the laptop contained “purported emails” that “reportedly exposed the alleged corrupt dealings” of Hunter.
The MRC also won’t tell you that the poll it paid for was done by Trump’s own pollster — raising questions about its honesty and accuracy — or that its CensorTrack database is highly selective, choosing only instances of “censorship” that advance the MRC’s victimhood narrative and is in no way a comprehensive examination that proves social media “censors” conservative content solely and exclusively.
Hall also rehashed the MRC’s bogus talking points: “Twitter alone censored Trump 625 times between May 31, 2018 and January 4, 2021 before he was kicked off of the platform. It has since refused to allow him back on the platform. Twitter did not censor Biden at all during the same period of time. Trump was banned from at least nine other platforms after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, during which the former President called for ‘peace.'” The more accurate way to say it is that Trump violated Twitter’s terms of service 625 times while Biden did not violate them at all, and it’s an absolute lie for Hall to claim that Trump was kicked off social for calling for “peace” at the riot he helped instigate.
The ultimate evidence that the MRC knows its talking point is bogus is that it sent out an email in April bragging about how well its content does on Facebook. Would it be making such extensive use of Facebook — and bragging about its reach there — if the “censorship” narrative was at all true? Doubtful.
As with the rest of its promotion of Trump’s lawsuit, this is all just partisan blathering not meant to be taken seriously outside the MRC’s ideological bubble.