A key revelation from Donald Trump’s New York trial was that the National Enquirer tabloid worked with Trump to kill the story of Stormy Daniels’ affair with him before the 2016 election. Oddly, the only reference to the Enquirer at the Media Research Center regarding Trump’s trial appears in an April 26 column by Tim Graham (also published at WorldNetDaily), who began thusly:
Eight years ago, the leftist media took great offense to being dismissed by Donald Trump as “fake news,” but they never seemed to grasp this is exactly how they painted the conservative media, as truth-defying propaganda outlets.
When the Trump trial turned to the National Enquirer, we could find national unity that the Enquirer defines “fake news.” The lefties are very excited to remind voters how the Enquirer was a Trump-allied tabloid full of garbage stories. But the liberal media spread some of them.
In May 2016, the Enquirer uncorked some garbage that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had cheated on his wife. ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined 15 and a half minutes spreading the word of this character assassination campaign.
Graham is lying. He and the MRC have treated the Enquirer as a very credible outfit … when it was reporting in alleged misdeeds by Democrats. They eagerly embraced the tabloid’s claims that John Edwards was having an affair; an August 2008 column by Brent Bozell (which was ghostwritten by Graham) cheered how “the National Enquirer has been trickling out the goods they collected on John Edwards having an affair and possibly a love child with campaign aide Rielle Hunter, staking out Edwards in a California hotel – and how he hid in the bathroom to avoid them,” further whining that non-right-wing media “sat on top of the dirty rug for months while the Enquirer dug out the Edwards affair.”
From there, Graham quickly moved toward whataboutism when it was pointed out that Trump colluded with the Enquirer to kill the Stormy Daniels story:
The pro-Biden “media reporters” are still upset this week about the Enquirer and how they played “catch and kill” with Trump accusers, squelching stories that might embarrass Trump. NPR’s David Folkenflik complained to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that burying salacious stories is “not a journalistic impulse, it’s not even a tabloid gossip impulse, this is essentially a partisan or propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign in all but name.”
This is coming from NPR, which aggressively trashed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “pure distraction.” Folkenflik engaged with the story only to dismiss it as “a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor.” When The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories acknowledging Hunter’s laptop was real in March and April of 2022, Folkenflik didn’t file a story with his regrets. He just kept attacking Fox News, his usual bread and butter.
So on the Hunter laptop, we can throw it back in Folkenflik’s face – NPR’s suppression was not a journalistic impulse, and NPR was essentially a propagandistic arm of the Biden campaign in all but name.
Worse yet, we fund it with our taxes. That gravy train should end.
As if the MRC is not a propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign, which should perhaps cause its beneficial nonprofit tax status to be re-evaluated. Graham then descended into a fit of Stelter Derangement Syndrome:
Ex-CNN reporter Brian Stelter said the same thing on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show about the Enquirer: “It has nothing to do with journalism.” David Pecker’s “not a news man. He’s an advertiser! He’s a marketer, and his product was Donald Trump.” Thanks, Sherlock Stelter. Nobody should define Mr. Pecker as a news man.
Like Folkenflik, Stelter squashed the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 as a Murdoch plot, or as a Russian disinformation campaign, because CNN’s a marketer and its product was anyone but Trump (meaning Joe Biden).
Stelter also showed up on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show. Wagner was hopping mad, asking what’s the point of a gag order on Trump when you have a “media-industrial complex that is effectively acting as a public defense line” for Trump? Once again, Wagner can’t imagine MSNBC acting as a “media-industrial complex” for the Democrats.
So does Wagner wish the judge could issue a gag order for the entire conservative media landscape? No criticism allowed of the get-Trump prosecutors and judge? I thought this was a democracy.
Stelter broke out the usual bravado that the liberals live on “Earth One,” and they must see what’s happening on “Earth Two,” which is an alternative universe of hallucinations. Stelter claimed “For Jesse Watters, Trump is God, and that is the programming every hour of every day on these other networks.”
That sounds like some crazy religion. Would Stelter survive a little fact check on whether Fox and Newsmax perpetually pray hourly to the Orange Lord and Savior?
Perhaps Graham, with all of that multimillion-dollar “media research” firepower behind him, can show us where Fox News and Newsmax have been the least bit critical of Trump in recent years? He seems to have forgotten that those outlets are currently being sued by Dominion and Smartmatic precisely because they placed their fealty to Trump above the truth.
Completely absent from Graham’s column are two words the MRC loves slinging at the non-right-wing media: election interference. It repeatedly declares anything that makes conservatives look bad — from calling out right-wing misinformation to purported search bias to Facebook fact-checking — to be “election interference.” The National Enquirer indisputably interfered in the 2016 election — by the MRC’s own definition — through its deliberate suppression of a negative story for Trump’s benefit. Why won’t Graham say the words? Or doesn’t he believe that right-wing meddling is “election interference”?