The Media Research Center is really the Right-Wing Narrative Perpetuation Center, and one current narrative is that President Biden is a senile old man who can’t handle interviews. So when Biden declined to do an interview during the Super Bowl, Tim Graham knew he had to apply the corporate narrative to it, which he did — along with added attacks on sworn MRC enemy Oliver Darcy — in a Feb. 6 post:
In the latest exhibit of Hiding Biden, the White House announced they will once again forego the tradition of a Super Bowl pregame interview of the president. It’s one thing for Team Biden to be afraid of Fox News. But Obama donor Gayle King on CBS? On Monday night, CNN “Reliable Sources” newsletter Oliver Darcy ran defense under the headline “Biden’s Media Scramble.”
Biden’s advisers have said that the decision to skip the interview was because they wanted to give the already fatigued public a break from politics during the big game. A White House official underscored that argument to me on Monday, adding that they believe the value of the interview has dropped, given it has over the years shifted from a more lighthearted media opportunity to a politics-focused affair.
This tradition really kicked in under Barack Obama, who always enjoyed the massive audience. Not every pregame interview was soft: Obama granted one to Fox star Bill O’Reilly. But Biden can’t even take CBS pablum.
When Darcy pointed out that Biden campaign officials are foregoing traditional interviews for “more creative” formats, Graham got huffy:
This avoidance of anyone harsher than Conan O’Brien or Anderson Cooper’s grief podcast is “more creative?” If President Trump had only accepted interview requests from Fox News, would Darcy accept this spin? Somehow skipping media scrutiny is an acceptable strategy, even if grumpy conservatives take exception.
In fact, President Trump did half of his Super Bowl interviews with Fox Newers — Bill O’Reilly in 2017 and Sean Hannity in 2020 — and skipped the Super Bowl interview entirely in 2018. (The 2019 interview was with CBS’ Margaret Brennan.) When Darcy repeated Biden officials’ contention that Biden has, in fact, done interviews with regular media, Graham huffed further: “Ahem! Those were NOT ‘hard-hitting sitdowns’!” As if Trump’s sit-downs with O’Reilly and Hannity were hard-hitting.
Graham managed to stay on point with his narrative: “But why wouldn’t the Biden White House/campaign keep skipping high-profile interviews? Which reporter (or media reporter) is really upset at how this shows contempt for the ‘professional media’ and their supposed duty of ‘holding people accountable’?” Of course, when people hold Republicans and right-wingers accountable for their lies and misinformation, the MRC calls it “censorship.”
As much as Graham wants us to believe that Darcy “falls in line” by reporting what the Biden campaign said about not doing the interview — most people would call that journalism — it’s Graham who is falling in line with the right-wing narratives he gets paid to push.