MRC Did Relatively Little Defense Of Nikki Haley During Her Presidential Campaign

In contrast to its rote defenses of Donald Trump (which it is apparently required to do due to its status as an arm of the Republican Party) and its incredibly busy DeSantis Defense Brigade, the Media Research Center devoted relatively little attention to defending Nikki Haley while she was running for president. An Oct. 8 post by Kevin Tober complained that Haley was called for spouting the dishonest right-wing talking point that the $6 million the Biden administration released to Iran helped to fund Hamas’ attack on Israel:

On Sunday, the day after the horrific and unprovoked terrorist attacks by Hamas against the state of Israel, the Biden administration’s surrogates in the media have begun circling the wagons around the president and pretending that the $6 billion he provided Iran didn’t embolden Hamas’s reign of terror. The latest evidence of this came during NBC’s Meet the Press when moderator Kristen Welker argued with former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley over whether the billions the U.S. gave Iran had anything to do with Saturday’s attacks. 

“Yesterday almost all of your Republican rivals blamed the Biden administration for this attack,” Welker huffed. “You just saw the Secretary of State effectively say there is no link between that deal and the horrific attacks that unfolded yesterday,” she added before asking the leading question: “Do you think it was irresponsible of your rivals to level that allegation without any evidence or proof?”

Haley responded by turning the “irresponsible” allegation around on Blinken and the Biden administration: “I actually think it was irresponsible for Secretary Blinken to say that the $6 billion doesn’t weigh in here. I mean, let’s be honest with the American people and understand that Hamas knows and Iran knows they’re moving money around as we speak because they know $6 billion is gonna be released.”

“They go and spread terrorism every time they get a dollar. It doesn’t go to the Iranian people, it does go to terrorist attacks, and Secretary Blinken’s just wrong to imply that this money is not being moved around as we speak to hurt those who love freedom,” Haley added. 

Welker bitterly interjected: “There’s just no proof of that yet. This was just the hours after that immediate attack. Is it irresponsible to level that charge when you really don’t have any evidence of that at this point in time?” 

“To think that they’re not moving money around is irresponsible to say that to the American people. They are moving money around to threaten those they hate,” Haley responded.

In fact, that money was Iran’s to begin with, the Trump administration had previously signed off on returning the money, and Iran, and a few days later the U.S. and Qatar, which was holding the money, agreed to block Iran from accessing it — meaning that Haley did, in fact, have no evidence to back up her claim. And Tober didn’t explain how Welker could be “bitterly” proving Haley to be factually wrong.

Alex Christy spent a Dec. 5 post complaining that Haley was fact-checked:

There are only three things certain in life: death, taxes, and professional fact-checkers condemning Republican politicians for lamenting the small size of the U.S. Navy. The latest installment in this nearly-decade long exercise of opinion-checking disguised as fact-checking came on Monday as PolitiFacat’s Louis Jacobson only gave presidential candidate Nikki Haley a “half-true” rating for her comparison of the American and Chinese navies, despite conceding she was completely correct.

The exact quote from Haley was that China has “the largest naval fleet in the world. They had 370 ships. They’ll have 400 ships in two years. We won’t even have 350 ships in two decades.”

Seems like a pretty straightforward fact-check and in the “if your time is short” summary, Jacobson writes, “Numerically, Haley is on target with both countries’ ship counts.”

However, Jacobson was unwilling to give Haley a true rating, “Military experts caution that other factors, including ships’ capabilities and advanced technologies, are just as important, if not more so. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has called ship counts ‘a one-dimensional measure.'”

This is not a fact-check; it is an opinion-check. 

[…]

PolitiFact should not be in the business of opinion-checking, but if it is going to insist, at the very least it should quote experts on both sides of the debate and let readers make up their own minds.

Christy didn’t explain why an opinion can’t be fact-checked if a factual claim is made in support of it.

When Haley goofed and failed to mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War, the MRC couldn’t be bothered to offer much of a defense. Mark Finkelstein merely noted in a Dec. 29 post that an MSNBC commentator “suggested that in doing so, Haley was misreading her core constituency.” Jeffrey Lord attempted more of a cleanup operation in his Dec. 30 column:

Catch that line about ‘Notably missing from her answer was slavery, which most mainstream historians agree was at the root of the United States’ bloodiest conflict, specifically the economics and political control behind slavery.”

And this line? “Democrats were quick to jump on her answer.”

So what’s missing in this reporting? The Times notes that Haley was silent about “the political control behind slavery.” Laughably, so was The Times.

When it comes to that “political control behind slavery” as I have noted in the past: 

“…. the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery? There were 6 from 1840-1860.”

In other words, the Times is after Haley – she a woman of color who is running for the nomination of the one political party that was specifically created in opposition to slavery. And without a trace of self-awareness or irony, the paper goes on to accuse Haley and Republicans of “downplaying the nation’s sordid racial history.”

[…]

The Times silence on just which party was staunchly pro-slavery is well in tune with President Joe Biden’s silence when it comes to issuing a formal apology from the Democratic Party to black Americans for his party’s long, decidedly on the record, support of both slavery and segregation, not to mention the Klan.

Lord didn’t mention the fact that the stances on racial issues that Democrats had effectively abandoned by the 1960s have largely been taken up by Republicans.

Curtis Houck used a Jan. 18 post to whine about Haley being called out on a different issue, her claim that America isn’t a racist country:

Wednesday night on their low-rated CNN show King Charles, CBS Mornings co-host and Democratic donor Gayle King and the NBA on TNT’s Charles Barkley blasted 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley for her claim that America’s never been a racist country. However, the two went further with predictably liberal, 1619 Project tropes that “America was built on” both “racism” and “slavery.”

As Hillsdale College’s David Azerrad wrote in an compendious essay for Real Clear Public Affairs in 2020, this notion “is the great self-evident truth of the left and of the ruling class whose moral opinions are shaped by it” and wielded as “their most powerful political weapon” to lucrative financial benefits.

[…]

Pivoting to scorn, Barkley said to King’s disagreement that he wasn’t “surprised” by Haley being so “stupid”, adding “America was built on racism” as King chimed in that “America was certainly built on slavery.”

After the two stated their agreement with each other, Barkley tried to offer a more nuanced view that we’re allowed to “criticize” America since it’s “the greatest country in the world” and merely “turn[ing] on the TV” will show there’s “racism” out there.

Two different matters, Chuck. It’s generally agreed slavery was present and it was such a tenuous issue at the time that a civil war ensued. But calling America a racist country and was built on it flew in the face of the Declaration of Independence, the Abolitionist movement, the lack of explicitly racist laws today, and major pieces of legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Barkley and King — two of the highest-paid TV personalities, regardless of color — have to keep the grievance train afloat, so Barkley sounded off on Haley for saying “something that stupid, and that’s just stupid.”

It’s telling of the current right-wing attitudes toward race — which, again, are the same ones that they accuse Democrats of once holding — that Houck smears Barkley and King as racist grifters trying to “keep the grievance train afloat” for simply stating historical facts. And Houck nonsensically citing “the lack of explicitly racist laws today” as evidence the country wasn’t built on racism ignores the fact that were were, in fact, explicitly racist laws during much of this country’s existence which the country was, in fact, built on.