MRC Defends Right-Wing Exploitation Of Hunter Biden’s Child For Political Purposes

The Media Research Center obsesses over all things Hunter Biden if it thinks it can personally destroy him — more importantly — his father, since it so fervently believes in the politics of personal destruction. Thus, the MRC felt the need to mock Hunter over a child custody dispute. Tim Graham devoted his July 5 column to complaining how it was pointed out that he and his fellow right-wingers obsessed over it and — more importantly — that the controversy was driven by the mother’s family trying to litigate the case in right-wing media:

In the July 2 New York Times, they suddenly decided to put the story of Hunter Biden’s controversial four-year-old daughter on the bottom of the front page of the Sunday paper.

The bizarre headline on a Katie Rogers piece: “Hunter Biden and the Politics of Paternity in the Media’s Glare.” There has been almost no media glare, at least on inside the Democrat media bubble. They lament the story’s “ubiquity” in conservative media.

The occasion for this sudden acknowledgment of reality was a child-support settlement after a “years-long court battle” – outside the media glare. Try finding any mention of the mother, Lunden Roberts, or the child, Navy Joan Roberts, in any “mainstream” media source. Searching for “Lunden Roberts” on the Times website gives you three results, two of them in the last few days. The name “Lunden Roberts” doesn’t appear until six paragraphs into the article, and only five paragraphs were on the front page.

[…]

It’s beyond ludicrous to assume that the Bidens aren’t “involved” in the politics of Hunter’s messes. But of course, “Democratic groups dedicated to helping the Biden family have disseminated information about Mr. [Garrett] Ziegler and the Roberts family, seeking to highlight their Trump ties.”

Liberal journalists should acknowledge it’s natural that people wronged by the Bidens would be welcomed by the conservative media, just as Trump-haters (like angry niece Mary Trump) would be celebrated by the liberal media.

Graham laughably claimed that “there’s ‘no evidence’ this is being politicized” – even though he had just conceded that the mother’s family was using political media to litigate it.

Graham concluded: “The Biden family is a sprawling reality show of misbehavior, like the Kennedys, and just like the Kennedys, the newspapers who boast they are the bold guardians of “truth” are exposed as hardened partisan operatives. The Trump family is too, yet he whined that Mary Trump talked to the media about it; the MRC previously tried to discredit a book she wrote about her family that showed Donald Trump to be something of a sociopath.

Kevin Tober complained that Republican attacks over a child were called out ina  July 9 post:

On Sunday’s NBC Meet the Press, moderator Chuck Todd took issue with Republicans criticizing Joe Biden for refusing to acknowledge his seventh grandchild who his son and well-known drug addict Hunter had with a stripper out of wedlock. To Todd, the issue was not that the Biden family have shunned the poor little girl Hunter and the stripper had together, it’s Republicans who are the villains of the story in Todd’s delusional mind. 

“I think we all understand the personal challenge and concern and all of these things that the President has here, but his political foes see this and they’re trying to exploit,” Todd lashed out. “There’s no doubt, every day DeSantis or Trump tries to use Hunter to beat up Biden.”

Todd or anyone else at NBC doesn’t get to lecture or claim the moral high ground by talking about how the children of Presidents should be treated. Frequent NewsBusters readers will recall how NBC treated Ivanka Trump.

Tober seems to have forgotten that Ivanka worked as an adviser to her father, while Hunter plays no role in his father’s administration.

In his daily hate-watch of “The View,” Nicholas Fondacaro spent a July 10 post whining that it was pointed out how the mother was exploiting the situation:

While ignoring the cocaine found in the White House last week and the new Axios report exposing President Biden as someone who verbally abuses his staff, the cackling coven of ABC’s The View defended the President for “following” his son’s “cue” and shunning the 4-year-old granddaughter his son Hunter fathered with a stripper. Together, the cast attacked the mother and demanded that everyone ignore how the President was mistreating his granddaughter.

[…]

Racist co-host Sunny Hostin said she was “split on this” because the child was born into the “circumstance” but attacked the mother, Lunden Roberts for attempting to “wedge herself into the [Biden] family.”

“And apparently, this was more of a one-night stand. It wasn’t like they had a relationship, he was in the throes of addiction when this woman became pregnant,” Hostin argued, decrying how the child was in a picture wearing “an Air Force One cap and at the Jefferson Memorial.”

Hostin went on to defend Biden’s shunning by saying he was “just following what his son has set in motion. And how do you fault any of that?”

Fondacaro absolutely would — and does, since he can politically exploit it. (And, yes, he still thinks Hostin is “racist” because he doesn’t understand how metaphors work.)

In a post the same day, Peter Kotara accused CNN of trying to deflect from the story:

On Monday’s episode of CNN’s Inside Politics with Dana Bash, the host and her panel discussed the surprisingly searing New York Times column that ripped into President Biden for denying the existence of Hunter Biden’s child. Despite CNN’s personality cult following of Biden, the panel found it extremely difficult to excuse his behavior.

Bash quoted from columnist Maureen Dowd: “According to the Times the President does not acknowledge the girl and he expects his staff to follow his lead. Quote, “In strategy meetings in recent years, aides have been told that the Bidens have six, not seven grandchildren, that’s according to two people familiar with the discussions.”

She continued, lamenting that “Republicans are using it and are going to take advantage of it in a way that is unfortunate inappropriate, but the reason they are doing it is because -and able to do that- is because of the brand and the kind of person that we all know and believe Joe Biden to be because it’s who he says he is, and it’s somebody who is a family man.”

Joe Biden was- not a family man? What a shock! It seemed the fact Biden denies the existence of his own grandchild was what it took to break through the liberal CNN bubble and get them to realize that he’s not some kind, gentle, family man. Republicans, of course, knew that from the beginning, and took the opportunity to support Lunden Roberts in her legal battles with Hunter. But the Democrats’ cult of personality support for the Bidens prevented them from seeing any possible flaw in them, until now.

Isn’t also a cult of personality of sorts — anti-personality, perhaps? — that Republicans  “took the opportunity to support Lunden Roberts” in order to make the Bidens look bad? Kotara was silent about that.

When President Biden did eventually acknowledge this grandchild, the MRC attacked that too.  Fondacaro spent a July 28 post whining that it didn’t lead every non-right-wing newscast:

President Joe Biden, who the liberal media told us was a man of decency fighting for the soul of America, finally admitted that he had seven and not six grandkids after he had to be (figuratively) dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge his 4-year-old granddaughter Navy Joan Roberts, who his son Hunter Biden fathered out of wedlock. When it came to the broadcast networks covering this embarrassing Friday evening news dumb, ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS Evening News were still ignoring the child.

Biden’s reluctant acknowledgment of Navy came in the form of an exclusive statement to PEOPLE magazine.

Instead of covering Biden’s long-delayed admission of having seven grandkids, ABC hyped a crane collapse in Maryland despite no injuries. And over on CBS, they kept their airwaves clean for Biden by highlighting an elderly man trying to find a new home for his collection of antique and vintage washing machines.

Fondacaro then gave a cookie to the right-wing outlet that did follow his narrative: “Over on Fox News Channel’s Special Report, White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich noted that the Biden administration had, up until Friday, strict rules for staff when speaking about the President’s family.

Fondacaro whined again in a July 31 post that non-right-wing media coverage wasn’t sufficiently hateful:

NBC News has parlayed being the first of the broadcast networks to report on President Joe Biden finally acknowledging his 4-year-old granddaughter into lionizing him Monday morning for taking that long and withstanding the criticism. Meanwhile, ABC and CBS didn’t want to stick their necks out that far as they spent barely over a minute (64 seconds) of combined time on the story over the weekend, taking 24 hours before they mentioned it.

After being the only broadcast network to cover how the Biden clan would finally acknowledge the little girl as one of their own, NBC only talked about it selectively on Saturday’s NBC Nightly News and Monday’s Today show. It was on the Today show that they really took up the task of trying to spin Biden’s long-time callousness against his granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts, into him being thoughtful.

[…] [Kelly] O’Donnell suggested that it took Biden almost five years to acknowledge his granddaughter (her birthday is in August) because of the legal and paternal battle between her mother, Lunden Roberts, and Hunter and not the bad polling the family was getting.

Fondacaro offered no evidence to back up his cynical accusation that the family recognized the child solely because of “bad polling.” Still, he regurgitated all this whining in the July 31 NewsBusters podcast.