The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham, it seems, still doesn’t understand how fact-checking works. In a Sept. 16 post, he tried to push a false narrative and complained that fact-checkers busted right-wing media for spreading it:
Sister Toldjah at RedState reported that those “independent fact checkers” at CNN and The Washington Post rushed to Biden’s defense again on Tuesday. They were upset that Republicans pounced on Team Biden for cutting off the president’s White House video feed in mid-question on Monday in Idaho, like he was going to lose his marbles.
For Biden critics, this easily recalled the recent Politico story about how embarrassed the Bidenites are “filled with anxiety” are about Biden speaking in public and “some White House staffers will either mute him or turn off his remarks” at their desks.
[…]Glenn Kessler threw Four Pinocchios – his Pants on Fire rating – for Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) asking the Secretary of State “It’s been widely reported that somebody has the ability to push the button and cut off his sound and stop him from speaking. Who is that person?”
That’s actually a question. Someone obviously cut the feed. They didn’t “stop him from speaking.” They stopped the public from hearing it. But Kessler aggressively and defensively interpreted it (which ain’t fact checking) as “Who’s that person behind the scenes secretly controlling President Biden?”
It wasn’t until the 13th paragraph of his article — after pushing the malicious right-wing narrative that Biden is purportedly suffering from “cognitive decline” — that Graham got around to admitting that Kessler is right:
There was a point in here. The White House described this as a “pool spray,” which suggested in advance they would cut off the feed to the media once the president turned to questions. But the president clearly didn’t wait for his team to cut the feed. He plowed ahead.
That’s right — the cutoff of the feed was planned in advance, and the media knew it. Which means Republicans were lying by claiming the feed was cut off to save Biden from embarrassment.
But when Kessler accurately pointed out that Republicans “made a mountain out of a molehill” and that “readers should be wary of partisan efforts to craft a narrative out of misleading clips,” Graham attacked Kessler, not his fellow Republicans, with lame whataboutism:
So Kessler isn’t really “fact checking” here. He’s objecting to “partisan efforts to craft a narrative.” As if The Washington Post is never guilty of this! The newspaper whose reporters have pumped out three hyperbolic anti-Trump books in 2021.
Yeah, whataboutism is pretty much all that Graham has here. He’s justifying Republicans spreading a lie, complaining that they got caught spreading it, and refusing to admit they were right to do so. That’s not “media research” — that’s partisan hackery at its worst, and it doesn’t make anyone want to trust anything the MRC does.