The Media Research Center went into Day 3 and beyond after Donald Trump being found guilty on all 34 counts in his New York trial the way it went into the first two: not taking it well. Alex Christy whined about Trump’s post-verdict misinformation being called out, then tried to parse things:
For Saturday’s Good Morning America on ABC, White House correspondent MaryAlice Parks denounced Donald Trump’s Friday speech, where he attacked the process that ended with him being found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records for “including misleading claims.” Unfortunately for ABC viewers, Parks never specified what these misleading claims were.
In studio, Parks began by recalling that, “Yesterday, we saw President Trump absolutely raging about this case, airing grievances, attacking everyone involved. Republicans then piling on. All of it prompting President Biden to break his silence.”
Who is “we”? ABC didn’t show the speech live. That aside, Parks transitioned to a recorded report and added that Trump is “Promising to appeal his conviction” and that he took to “microphones to fume and rail about the case against him, calling it a scam.”
[…]It is hard to tell what specific claims Parks is trying to refute. Other fact-checkers have tried to do opinion-checking, claiming former Biden DOJ number three official Matthew Colangelo’s presence on Alvin Bragg’s team was no big deal.
Christy seems not to understand that opinions can be fact-checked if they are based of faulty assumptions. He also whined that “The fact-checkers also took issue with Trump calling the falsificiation of a misdemeanor because Trump was accused of also trying to cover up some other crime, but that other crime was never specified, leading to serious Sixth Amendment concerns.” In fact, the specific “some other crime” is irrelevant here, since the crime being charged is falsifying business records to conceal a crime.
Jorge Bonilla spent a June 2 post huffing that a historian was pleased that Trump was held accountable for his crimes:
The Regime Media’s selling of the sanctity of the verdict to convict former President Donald Trump in the New York business records trial requires the intervention of, what else…regime historians.
Watch as CBS Sunday Morning trots out none other than Douglas Brinkley for that all-important historical spin on the Trump verdict, which is laid quite thick here:
[…]You may ask yourselves why there is such a rush to get historians out there to weigh in on the verdict. Primarily, they are there to bolster calls to defend the sanctity of the judicial process, now that its crass perversion therein has yielded its intended result.
Bonilla offered no evidence that the unanimous verdict rendered by a panel of jurors after a trial that lasted more than a month, during which Trump was fully allowed to defend himself, was a “crass perversion.”
Clay Waters groused that Trump now has to wear the “felon” label:
In Saturday’s front-page story by New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker on the aftermath of the Trump trial in Manhattan, Baker relished the contrast between Biden and the “felon” Trump, while fiercely defending the Democratic president against allegations his administration had anything to do with the former president’s prosecution.
The print edition headline was over the top: “Biden Denounces G.O.P. Moves To Subvert the Decision of a Jury.” So disagreeing with the verdict in one heavily politicized case is subverting justice?
[…]Baker dropped the word “felon” a lot, though the actual offense Trump was convicted of, falsifying business records, was a rarely prosecuted misdemeanor, charges boosted up by convoluted and controversial legal shenanigans into felonies. Baker smirked in print: “It says something about today’s politics that running against a felon is not seen as a winning strategy.”
Things really got obnoxious at the end, with Baker letting loose with what seemed like years of bottled-up hostility cherishing the compare-and-contrast between Biden’s presidential public persona and Trump the “convicted felon.”
Like Christy, Waters whined about “the presence of Matthew Colangelo, former third-in-command in Biden’s Justice Department, on prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s team. The press love to pretend that all these Democrat prosecutors — many like Bragg, elected on the promise of prosecuting Trump — aren’t political. We all know if an elected Republican DA in a deep-red district that voted 90 percent for Trump indicted Biden, they wouldn’t demand respect for the prosecutor and judge and jury.” That’s just a bogus right-wing conspiracy theory used to push the never-proven idea that President Biden personally pushed for Trump’s prosecution.
Curtis Houck ran to Fox News to insist that it’s actually non-right-wing people in the media behaving badly over the verdict, not his co-workers:
NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck made his latest Fox News appearance late Friday on Fox News @ Night and partnered with host Trace Gallagher and The Federalist’s Evita Duffy to ridicule the liberal media’s deranged and overly excited reactions to Thursday’s criminal conviction of former President Trump by a Manhattan jury.
Gallagher first had correspondent Matt Finn set the table with a mash-up of clips, including ABC’s The View co-host Joy Behar admitting she lost control of her bladder upon hearing the verdict, The View’s Sunny Hostin claiming she has sources inside the Manhattan D.A.’s office hoping for jail time, and Chris Matthews predicting “violence” by Trump supporters.
Houck reacted by saying it “remind[ed]” him “of the Judge Alito controversy” in that he came away with the same concern for all these hyper-partisan lefties, which is concern for whether they have anything else to occupy their minds besides melting down about Trump.
“[D]o these people have hobbies? Like, do they do things for fun? Like, do they have kids or a spouse or a dog? Like do they like sports? I really wonder what do they do with their free time because it’s so apocalyptic and it’s so like faux doomsday nonsense,” Houck explained to a chuckling Gallagher.
Um, doesn’t Houck get paid to peddle right-wing conspiracy theories about Democrats? Does he have a family or hobbies? What does he do with his free time besides appearing on Fox News?
P.J. Gladnick gushed over how “CNN’s senior legal analyst has tossed cold water on their jubilation with a devastating analysis of how the prosecutors captured their political prey,” insisting that “the case was based on an outside the statute of limitations misdemeanors federal case which was converted to a felony state case in which the underlying crimes were not even mentioned.”
Tim Graham used his June 3 podcast to repeat those right-wing conspiracy theories about the trial being a Trump witch hunt:
Reporters might admit the Trump convictions are a “political gift” for the Democrats, but they still claim there’s “no evidence” the prosecution was political — and especially, that anyone could claim Biden and his administration were behind it. The networks strongly suppressed the painfully obvious notion that Democrats are prosecuting Trump to damage his re-election chances.
In a piece puffing up Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Washington Post reporter Shayna Jacobs wrote: “Some thought the case was weak. Others — namely the defendant and his allies — continue to insist without offering evidence that it was a politically motivated attack on Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election.” The paragraph right before it noted Bragg was an elected Democrat.
An Associated Press “fact check” by “news verification reporter” Melissa Goldin concluded: “Throughout the trial Trump has said, without evidence, that the indictments were politically orchestrated by Democratic President Joe Biden and his administration in an effort to keep him out of the White House. But Biden and his administration have no control over this prosecution. The case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a state-level prosecutor.”
Even that doesn’t acknowledge Bragg is an elected Democrat, and it doesn’t mention former Biden Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo joining Bragg’s team to get Trump.
As Graham well knows, correlation does not equal causation, and the coincidences he cites do not equal an anti-Trump conspiracy and are certainly not the same thing as “evidence.”
Graham also huffed: “NBC reporter Ryan J. Reilly also played masquerade in an online report: ‘Advance Democracy, a nonprofit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg…’ You know a group is on the Left when the media refuse to label them accurately.” It’s absurd and disturbing that Graham is playing labeling games instead of being concerned that Merchan and Bragg have been the target of violent rhetoric (from his side, we might add).