As Donald Trump’s New York trial ground on, the Media Research Center continued to whine that non-right-wing media reported facts on the trial instead of pro-Trump talking points. Tim Graham tried to play whataboutism, with a touch of Stelter Derangement Syndrome, in his May 17 podcast:
Part of the endless Trump trial coverage on MSNBC was The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell reading what sounded like bad diary entries on courtroom happenings. Porn star Stormy Daniels dressed loosely in black, which “suggested the modesty of a nun.” How bizarre.
Days later, O’Donnell mocked Trump’s appearance in court. He “leaves his face, with his eyes closed, in tortured elderly shapes when he drifts off into his closed-eye space, his mouth shifts from its preferred scowl to the look of a collapsing old building.” Ever have that feeling of “collapsing building mouth”?
On MSNBC, Brian Stelter told Ari Melber the GOP’s in terrible shape, with all these Trump bootlickers showing up at his trial in Manhattan. “I’m just trying to imagine if any Democrats are going to show up at the trial of Bob Menendez, the senator, or or the trial of Joe Biden’s son Hunter — both of which are gonna happen in the next few weeks! And we’re not gonna see any of this, and that tells you everything you need to know about the differences between these two parties in 2024.”
To which there is an obvious rejoinder: We’re just trying to imagine if any Democrat-servant networks are going to show up at the trials of Senator Menendez or Hunter Biden. No one expects they will be doing gavel-to-gavel coverage for those trials, and that tells you everything you need to know about the Democrat-servant networks.
Graham returned to whine in a May 19 post that Fox News’s highly biased coverage of the trial was called out:
Politico senior media writer Jack Shafer argued on Saturday that Fox’s coverage of the Trump trial in Manhattan exposed a propaganda network — while CNN and MSNBC going into gavel-to-gavel overdrive does not? The headline:
Fox News Is Flipping Trump’s Trial Coverage on its Head
The conservative network is curating its coverage to boost Trump.
The liberal networks are curating their coverage to damage Trump – except it seems to help him instead. The liberals think of their obsession as the definition of “normal” news judgment. How could anyone dissent from their journalistic wisdom and think there are other stories to tell?
Shafer suggests this is an effort to “coddle Trump-loving viewers,” as if the others aren’t coddling Trump-hating viewers. Then he claims “the numbers don’t lie.” Which numbers? They are sketchy numbers.
[…]Wait, wait — if Fox is mentioning the Trump trial “about half as often” as CNN or MSNBC, how is that defined as a “brownout”? Shafer explains some Reuters reporters noted Fox was reporting on anti-Israel campus protests — like there’s other news in the world. One selected hour of The Faulkner Focus only had ten minutes on the trial. Outrageous!
Shafer pleases his Politico audience by arguing Fox is “less a news station than a purveyor of conservative propaganda, after all.”
Aside from the nitpicking, Graham didn’t dispute the fact that Fox News has a pro-Trump tilt or promotes conservative propaganda (funny, we thought Graham and his co-workers hated bias in the media), though he refused to hang thte “Republican servant” tag on it the way he called the other channels “Democrat-servant networks.” Instead, he went on to whine that “MSNBC only broadcast three of Trump’s outside-the-court reactions, while Fox had 33, and Jack and David [Folkenflik] didn’t identify that as ‘scant.'” Graham didn’t mention whether any of those 33 Trump clips were fact-checked by Fox News or why airing so many of them doesn’t prove that Fox News has a pro-Trump bias.
In another May 19 post, Graham tried to play whataboutism over the cosplay of Republicans outside the courthouse being pointed out:
On Saturday’s Chris Wallace Show, the CNN host couldn’t help making fun of Republicans turning up at the Trump trial all wearing navy blazers, white shirts, and red ties. On screen, the mocking caption was “WHO WORE THE TRUMP UNIFORM BEST?” But New York Times reporter and podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro took it to another level comparing the Republicans to bootlickers of Iraqi madman Saddam Hussein.
[…]This clearly looks coordinated as a team effort, much like say, the Houston Astros all wearing orange ties to the White House. When all the leftist women team-dress in white as a pro-abortion sentiment, the media laud it.
There’s a difference between being a sports team or promoting a cause versus sycophantically supporting a political leader on trial for criminal offenses, but Graham sure didn’t see it.
Curtis Houck sounded like a PR writer for the Trump campaign in a May 22 post whining about the amount of coverage the trial has received in non-right-wing media:
Despite the legal justifications viewed as anywhere from flimsy to non-existent, ABC, CBS, and NBC rose to the occasion for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) by spending an interminable 573 minutes on the trial of former President Donald Trump, an un-American leftist charade to influence the 2024 election.
NewsBusters examined every allusion to and mention of the Trump trial on the major broadcast networks during their flagship morning shows, evening newscasts, and Sunday political talk shows, starting with the morning of jury selection on April 15. In the 38 days since the trial began, the networks have dedicated 573 minutes and 25 seconds.
Put another way, the networks have force-fed viewers more than nine hours of coverage.
Houck refused to explain why Fox News was deliberately excluded from his calculations, and he refused to explain why Trump’s trial didn’t deserve that amount of coverage or why it was “interminable” (though we suppose it would be for a Trump dead-ender like Houck who doesn’t like hearing the truth about Trump get out). Instead, he whined that the corruption trial of “liberal Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ)” wasn’t getting similar coverage: “A major U.S. senator is on trial in an election year, facing hundreds of years behind bars. But given his party, the networks have allowed the left to skate by.” A senator is not a president, and Menendez does not have the national profile that Trump does. Yet he didn’t count the Menendez coverage on Fox News either — you’d think he would want to show that coverage to shame those other channels.
Houck, in his headline, portrayed the trial coverage in all-caps as “ELECTION INTERERENCE.” We don’t recall Houck ever describing the right-wing obsession with personally destroying Hunter Biden as “election interference.”