Media Research Center executive Tim Graham’s Brian Stelter Derangement Syndrome kicked in again in his May 24 column:
Is The New Republic still an opinion journal, or has it turned into a science-fiction magazine? For their June issue, the magazine put Donald Trump on the cover with a Hitler moustache over the headline “American Fascism: What It Would Look Like.” They published eight fever-brained visions of Trumpian fascism in a second term.
Former CNN host Brian Stelter penned a fictional article titled “Revenge and Freedom From Fact: On the media in a fascist America.” It’s unintentionally funny to decry “freedom from fact,” and then write an entire article based on nothing but your own twitterpated potboiler instincts.
Stelter offered a few real-world niblets – like ugly trolling tweets he received — in the soup of his MAGA-fascist fiction. He asked readers to “imagine” a second Trump inauguration with “very motivated activists” breaking through the White House perimeter, and they appear to be wearing press credentials (which are fake).
An executive for an organization that loves to smear non-right-wingers as “digital brownshirts” lacks any moral authority to complain about others making Nazi allusions. Graham is also deliberately downplaying what the trolls said about Stelter so he can ignore the factual basis of Stelter’s speculation:
Trump’s violent rhetoric emboldened his devotees. During the Biden years, pro-Trump trolls daydreamed that, once back in power, they would imprison journalists and crush opponents, and they were welcomed to say so on Elon Musk’s X. As an ex-CNN anchor, I saw it in my mentions when MAGA diehards fantasized about having me locked up at Guantánamo Bay: “Gitmo is in your future.” “You filthy nazi traitor demokkkrats belong in GITMO.” “All of you deserve to be jailed.”
Anonymous threats were accompanied by brash promises by Trump loyalists. “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” former Defense Department official Kash Patel told Bannon in 2023. “We’re going to come after you,” Patel proclaimed, “whether it’s criminally or civilly.” Bannon, overjoyed, said, “We’re absolutely dead serious.”
Note that Graham doesn’t actually denounce those “ugly trolling tweets,” and he makes sure to censor Stelter’s reference to the desire of Trump’s toadies to target the media for being insufficiently loyal. Which then gave Graham the opportunity to dismiss Stelter’s next scenario:
Then Stelter imagined one tweeted video of a CBS correspondent offering a water bottle to a protester who was pepper-sprayed, and the right-wing narrative becomes: “The media is complicit. They’re in on it. THEY are trying to assassinate OUR president.”
In retaliation, Team Trump, “fed up with years of accountability journalism” [!] bans most reporters from entering the White House grounds, citing threats to the president’s life. “As Truth Social fills up with memes equating journalists with ‘terrorists,’ networks are given 24 hours to remove their equipment.” In the end, “Fox and Newsmax are allowed on the White House grounds so officials can claim that ‘real’ news is still represented.”
The weirdness of this nightmare is striking compared to the actual reality of the first Trump term, where the Trump team could barely keep out CNN’s Jim Acosta for a week, while CNN had six other credentialed White House reporters.
The MRC worked hand in hand to try and delegitimize Acosta for doing his job, and it lustily cheered when the Trump White House pettily stripped him of his press pass. Graham offered no reason why Acosta deserved to be banned from the White House press corps on Trump’s orders, and he won’t admit Trump’s petty behavior in trying to do so — it’s completely simpatico with Trump’s anti-media narrative, after all. And, really, given what we know about the MRC’s anti-media agenda, is it so far-fetched to assume that Graham and Co. would not exploit that example of a correspondent giving a water bottle to a pepper-sprayed protester to screech that the media is “complicit” with protesters? It’s done that before.
Graham then used his own imagination to concoct scenarios to portray the “mainstream media” as an evil monolith out to destroy Trump (by reporting on what he did):
Stelter concluded that Trump fans “have been primed for revenge and for freedom from fact. If the chill descends in 2025, no one can claim to be surprised.”
It’s far more realistic to imagine that a second Trump term will begin as the last term ended, depending on who controls Congress. Stelter’s “mainstream media” will be ready to push more impeachments and special prosecutors and criminal trials. There will be zero introspection about their “freedom from fact” journeys with Russian collusion theories and Kremlin-organized Hunter Biden laptop conspiracies.
In fact, there were credible accusations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. And if it was a “conspiracy” to point that the right-wing war on Hunter Biden is a “conspiracy,” why did the MRC stealthily correct dozens of articles to reflect the fact that the main source for corruption claims against Hunter was working with the Kremlin? And why is Graham so opposed to Trump being held accountable for his actions? Does his paycheck depend on how sycophantic he is the Trump?
Graham concluded with a gratuitous shot at the current president: “Perhaps we should imagine a fictional scenario of just how mentally incapacitated President Biden gets in a second term. Is he ruling… or drooling?” As if Graham and the MRC would ever report the truth about Trump’s apparently declining mental faculties.