The Media Research Center loves attacking President Biden’s State of the Union addresses, and this year was no exception. Trump apple-polisher Curtis Houck unironically smeared an ABC reporter as an “apple polisher” for merely reporting a preview of the address:
ABC’s Good Morning America set the table on Thursday for President Biden’s fourth (and possibly final) State of the Union address by doing what ABC and chief Biden apple polisher Mary Bruce do best: polish apples for the regime. Between her two liveshots, Bruce offered all the usual talking points about Biden needing to “sell skeptical voters on his accomplishments” and “tout his record” vs. a possibly “rowdy” GOP.
In the first hour, co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos set the table by touting the “a critical moment for the President” and “[h]is best chance with the biggest audience to make his case for four more years and the defeat of Donald Trump.”
[…]Bruce closed with a word about Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) being selected to give the Republican response, calling her “an interesting pick”, knocking both her as somehow a fake representation of the GOP because she’s “intended to show the next generation of the aging-male-dominated Republican Party”.
Houck did not explain how he supposedly knows so much about Bruce’s inner life or the the intent of her words — or perhaps he’s just making it up.
Alex Christy objected to another speech preview: “MSNBC presidential historian Michael Beschloss dropped by Thursday’s Andrea Mitchell Reports to preview President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address and to warn that ‘we could be a dictatorship next year,’ which means that Biden is akin to FDR warning about the Nazis and the Japanese prior to World War II.”
The MRC then decided that any media outlet that did not spew the kind of right-wing Fox News-esque hate it demanded at the address was working for the Biden campaign:
- CNN Does Damage Control for Biden’s Senior Moments During SOTU Speech
- ABC Praises SOTU: ‘Great Night’ for Biden, Tapped into ‘Old-Time Religion’
- MSNBC Goes Full North Korea Media Over Biden State of the Union Speech
- ABC Gets Weak Knees Over ‘Aggressive’, Fiery’, ‘Tough’ Biden’s ‘Feisty’, ‘Rowdy’ SOTU
- NBC Hypes ‘Energized’, ‘Feisty’ Biden’s ‘Mix of Energy, Humor, Combativeness’ at SOTU
- The View: Biden’s ‘Incredible’ SOTU Didn’t Trigger My ‘Depression, Anxiety’
- ‘Fire in the Belly’; CBS Revels in ‘Fiery’ Biden Coming ‘Out…Swinging’ at GOP in SOTU
When it was pointed out that Republicans were being jerks during the speech, the MRC got mad about that too, in the form of a March 8 post by Tim Graham:
The PBS NewsHour team wore their Democrat donkey ears after the president’s speech on Thursday. Co-host Geoff Bennett touted Joe Biden in his first post-speech sentence: “That was a forceful and feisty State of the Union address!” Then the Republicans were criticized for…mostly not heckling.
By contrast with Biden’s hour-plus of screaming at Republicans, PBS gave a demerit to House Republicans for…not listening? Overall, they were remarkably disciplined, so they had to hammer that from the other direction.
PBS congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins spoke from her cell phone with her personal opinion: “You may have seen this on the screen. House Republicans were not listening to that speech, by and large. Not just out of defiance, they just seemed not to be paying attention. They were almost only here physically, almost bordering on a disrespectful way, and is something I’ve never seen to this degree before.”
Christy, the comedy cop, lashed out at CBS’ Stephen Colbert and his guest for failure to hate the speech:
CBS chief political analyst John Dickerson joined Stephen Colbert on Thursday for a special live edition of The Late Show, where the two fawned over President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address by claiming that simply by giving the speech, Biden “reknits those bonds” of democracy.
[…]Dickerson continued in his admiration, “You can’t– if you are going to set the stakes for a political moment, you can’t set them any higher than 1941 fighting before World War II. So, he set them immediately, he started in fifth gear.”
After a quick Colbert quip about Biden’s Corvette, Dickerson continued, “The only other historical moment that you would pick that has equal weight is the Civil War and he name-checked that too and why? He’s calling on the ghosts of January 6, which aren’t even ghosts. There are people in that room there who helped that happen.”
[…]Despite all the pomp and circumstance, Biden’s address was simply a Democratic stump speech, so of course CBS loved it.
Christy didn’t explain how the views on a single comedy show suddenly represents every single CBS employee, the vast majority of whom do not work on the show.
Clay Waters played whataboutism with rude Republicans in a March 9 post:
An interactive slide show posted to the New York Times site on Wednesday, the day before President Biden’s State of the Union address (“How the State of the Union Became a Picture of Disunion”) relayed a slanted history of partisan scrapping at recent State of the Union addresses that suggested Republicans were almost wholly responsible for the turn to incivility.
The slideshow featured historical text by Peter Baker, White House correspondent.
Here’s the entry for George W. Bush suggesting nothing untoward had happened at a SOTU before at least 2007: “Even at the height of the Iraq war, decorum still reigned. In 2007, George W. Bush called it a “high privilege” to address the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, even though she was a vocal critic of his war policy.”
But Baker completely skipped over the start of the present-day SOTU partisanship: The booing of George W. Bush by Democrats during his State of the Union addresses in both 2004 and 2005.
And one anti-Republican point Baker included, Obama’s 2009 speech in which Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You Lie” when Obama said illegal immigrants wouldn’t be eligible for Obamacare, was not even made at a State of the Union but at a joint session of Congress. It made the slideshow anyway.
Geoffrey Dickens assembled a March 11 summary post rehashing all these complaints: “The bar was so lowered for him that all Joe Biden had to do was finish his State of the Union address for the in-the-tank leftist media to declare it a successful launch to his 2024 campaign. But they went overboard as they celebrated Biden’s ‘fiery’ and ‘feisty’ speech and his ‘punch in the face’ to the GOP.” He didn’t explain why such analyses were factually wrong.
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