MRC Had Little To Do With This Year’s CPAC, Despite Going All In Last Year

Last year, the Media Research Center got over years of feuding with the conservative political gathering CPAC (including throwing a tantrum over MRC chief Brent Bozell not being graced with a sufficiently prominent speaking slot) and went all in on promoting it — even devoting a post to CPAC speaker Robert Malone’s misinformation about COVID and its vaccines that pretended he was a victim because his misinformation was called out. This year’s CPAC coverage, however, was much more subdued; the only substantive post related to it was a Feb. 25 flashback post by Rich Noyes rehashing “Years of Liberal Media Mockery of CPAC”:

As they have for the past 50 years, grassroots conservatives gathered this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), capped by a speech yesterday by former President and current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.

And throughout those years, liberals in the media have snickered and scoffed at the “zany” attendees (who presumably don’t care much for the liberal media, either). NewsBusters has tracked the coverage over the years, as both journalists and late-night comics have slammed CPAC as akin to “the bar scene in Star Wars,” “an aviary for far-right ‘wacko birds,’” and an “audience of malignant children.”

“They are not Americans,” MSNBC’s far-left host Ed Schultz smeared in 2015. “They don’t care about the greater good of society.”

Just last year, ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel ridiculed CPAC as a conference where “every low-rent radio host and podcast racist with a dye job and a fleece vest shows up to try to out-crazy each other.”

Noyes didn’t dispute the accuracy of any of those observations — nor did he explain why the MRC wasn’t promoting this year’s event.

A Feb. 27 post by Catherine Salgado touted how right-wing activist Mike Davis, whom she baselessly insisted was a “Republican legal expert,” “called out anti-liberty tech giants while speaking on a panel at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)” while saying right-wing-friendly things like “Amazon is essentially China’s shopping mall, right? They do China’s bidding, they’re crushing small businesses in America, and they’re making a lot of money doing that.”

Jeffrey Lord’s March 2 column attempted to portray CPAC as “Thousands of conservatives gathering in Maryland’s National Harbor for the usual presentations by notable conservatives in fields ranging from foreign policy to economics to social issues” while complaining that Seth Meyers called out something Donald Trump said in his CPAC speech.

The only other references to this year’s CPAC were in passing:

• A Feb. 23 post by Jorge Bonilla referenced a reporter “filing from CPAC centered around the politics of the ruling” regarding the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling related to the personhood of embryos created through IVF.
• A Feb. 26 post by Mark Finkelstein noted that an MSNBC show discussed far-right North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, noting that the show “ran a clip of Robinson at CPAC.”

The MRC has yet to explain why it gave this year’s CPAC such short shrift after going all in on it last year. Perhaps it was because of the ongoing ongoing legal action against Matt Schlapp, in which he was accused of groping a male staffer for then-Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker (the staffer dropped his lawsuit a month after this year’s CPAC). Or it could be all the Nazis that showed up to the event (even though the MRC demands free speech for Nazis).

So, what gives, MRC? Inquiring minds want to know.