A while back, we noted how the Media Research Center was serving up fake sympathy for two Democratic senators who were facing aggressive protests over being roadblocks for Democratic initiatives — even though it never complained when anti-abortion activists used those very same protest tactics against abortion clinic employees. Scott Whitlock tried to keep that hypocritical narrative alive in a Dec. 20 post:
Joe Manchin on Sunday likely doomed Joe Biden’s massive $2 trillion spending plan and the media reaction was predictably hyperbolic. There were audible gasps on ABC when the news that he would vote no broke.
The New York Times on Monday’s front page accused him of “deserting” the President. Incendiary talk by liberal journalists has been amplified by real-world bullying of Manchin and his fellow moderate Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
So the question must be asked: Do journalists care about the safety of Manchin and Sinema? For the last few months, the two centrists have endured an escalating series of incidents in which leftist protesters follow them, yell in bathrooms, and show up at their homes. What has the response from ABC, CBS and NBC been? They’ve mostly buried the abuse.
Needless to say, the MRC has never reported on the “abuse” of abortion clinic workers by anti-abortion protesters using those exact same tactics, let alone refer to those protesters as “crazed” or “unhinged,” the epithets it has used against the anti-Manchin and Sinema protesters. The MRC clearly believes that if you work in the abortion business, you deserve that kind of abuse. The most notorious of that abuse, of course, is the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller inside a church by an anti-abortion protester; at the time, the MRC and the ConWeb wanted to pretend that Roeder wasn’t a “mainstream” protester and fretted more about how bad the murder made the anti-abortion movement look than about the tactic of harassing Tiller in church.
Also needless to say, no major MRC website — NewsBusters, CNSNews or MRCTV — has reported to their readers how a fire that destroyed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Knoxville, Tenn., has been ruled an arson.
Whitlock concluded by huffing: “Now that the moderate Manchin is a ‘no’ on spending an extra $2 trillion, you can assume that the harassment and bullying will only escalate. So, to the question, ‘Do journalists care about the safety of Manchin and Sinema?,’ the answer, it appears, is no.” By the same standard, the MRC does not care about the safety of anyone who works at an abortion clinic, and we can assume that, by its silence on what happened to that Planned Parenthood clinic, it also approves of arson as a legitimate protest tactic.