The Media Research Center loves it when Fox News lashes out at President Biden — even though it’s exactly the kind of media bias it attacks when a non-right-wing media outlet is accused of doing the same to a Republican. Kevin Tober spent a June 15 post whining that Fox News’ egregious bias was called out:
Liberal media janitor and former Brian Stelter stooge Oliver Darcy threw a hissy fit in his reliably liberal Reliable Sources newsletter late Wednesday evening over a chyron that aired Tuesday night on Fox News during a split screen moment when both former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden spoke at the same time. The chyron read “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested” while Biden was speaking on screen. This of course set Darcy and the rest of the pretentious leftists in the media into a fit of rage.
“The White House is disgusted with Fox News — even more so than usual,” Darcy sneered in the opening line of his newsletter. “Over the last 24 hours, the right-wing talk network has targeted President Joe Biden and his administration with unseemly lines of attack, bashing the Democratic White House with smears that represent even lows for a channel that is home to dangerous and incendiary rhetoric,” Darcy huffed.
Darcy grumbled that “Fox News outrageously labeled Biden a ‘wannabe dictator’ in an on-screen banner Tuesday night and declared that he had ordered his ‘political rival arrested.’”
“The banner matched hours of reckless commentary from the network’s top hosts and personalities in the wake of disgraced former President Donald Trump’s arraignment,” he added.
Darcy was still angry despite the fact that Fox issued a statement regarding the incident: “The chyron was taken down immediately and was addressed,” Fox News said in a statement.
Note that Tober uncritically accepted Fox News’ claim that the situation “was addressed,” showing no curiosity into exactly how. It’s also worth noting that the original headline of Tober’s post called the “wannabe dictator” slur “hilarious”; in a later bit of stealth-editing, the word was removed without alerting readers to the change. Since the internet never forgets, we also know that the MRC also stealth-deleted Tober’s description of the slur in the first paragraph of his post as “hilarious (and accurate)”.
Instead, Tober tried to play whataboutism:
Did Darcy ever take issue with the “incendiary rhetoric” or “reckless commentary” on his own network (CNN) or MSNBC? There is plenty there. Especially during the Trump years when the vitriol was at an all time high at the two leftist networks. Surely accusing Trump of being a Russian agent with zero evidence to back it up would qualify as reckless.
“Zero evidence”? Tober clearly didn’t read the Mueller report, which documented that there were numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives and that onetime Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort shared internal polling data with a man tied to Russian intelligence.
Tober provided no evidence of “incendiary rhetoric” on either channel that rose to the level of the Biden slur. He further whined that Darcy called out the New York Times for failing to use what Tober called “his preferred insults toward Fox News and their former host Tucker Carlson.” But Darcy simply called Fox News a “right-wing talk network,” and Tober didn’t explain how that is an “insult.” Tober then tried to defend Fox News:
Darcy would lose his mind if The New York Times described CNN as a left-wing talk network which would actually be more accurate than his preferred label for Fox.
Unlike CNN, Fox has some straight news shows with no opinion hosts. You cannot say the same for CNN which is all liberal all the time.
Who is the CNN equivalent of Bret Baier or Shannon Bream? They don’t have one.
Again, Tober offered no evidence that CNN is the liberal equivalent to Fox News, and he ignored the copious evidence from Fox News’ own staffers that the “news” side of Fox News is worthless, as revealed in the Dominion lawsuit findings, and even the conservative-friendly AllSides agrees that Fox News’ “news” operation skews right (as one might expect given all the former MRC employees who work there).
As far as Tober’s two examples of purportedly good Fox News journalists: Baier spread fake news in 2016 with a story claiming that Hillary Clinton’s indictment was imminent — a story the MRC heavily promoted but failed to correct when Baier retracted it. Bream has a history of bias as well.
Tober unintentionally demonstrated the MRC’s Fox News-shaped blind spot in detecting media bias. He simply believes that there is no bias whatsoever to be found there.