The Media Research Center is not about to let go of its 2020 election fraud conspiracy theory anytime soon. Tim Graham huffed in a June 24 post:
It’s still self-evident that Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election “in a landslide” as he claimed, so that was obvious terrain for a “fact checker.” But the pro-Biden media can’t stop imagining that Trump’s going to lose in 2024, and they’re accusing the right-wingers of mangling facts in advance.
On Thursday’s PBS News Hour, co-host Geoff Bennett led off the show promoting a segment on “how Republican disinformation is sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2024 election.” Later, Bennett introduced a segment from Laura Barron-Lopez: “It’s been more than three years since baseless claims about a rigged 2020 election inspired an attack on the U.S. Capitol, but the lies have not stopped.”
She played a clip of Trump: “The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, and we’re not going to let them rig the presidential election in 2024.”
Where is the “lie” in that? It’s one thing to say Trump “won,” and it is another to say it was “rigged.” The media certainly did their best to “rig” it by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop, and blaming every Covid death on Trump, and claiming in their “fact checks” that Trump was wrong to say a vaccine was almost ready.
Lots of misleading words and false conflation here. Note that Graham doesn’t explicitly state that Trump was lying about winning the election, only his exaggerated claim that he won by a “landslide” — he has to keep that argument open to further right-wing election disinformation this year, which he deflects from by playing 2020 whataboutism.
Note also that Graham will never admit that there were good reasons to question the laptop story — it did, in fact, look like Russian disinformation, and the newspaper that put the story out, the New York Post, is a right-wing pro-Trump rag that is not above spreading Russian disinformation, which was compounded by the fact that the Post offered no independent verification of the laptop, making it look even more sketchy. He’s also being overbroad by claiming that “the media” suppressed the laptop when he really means non-right-wing media who offered reasonable skepticism given the lack of verification, as opposed to right-wing outlets like Fox News and the MRC who asked no questions because the story fit their anti-Biden narratives.
Graham complaining that “the media” was “blaming every Covid death on Trump” is hypocritical because his MRC is running that same playbook against Biden by solely blaming him for inflation. (Also, there is the matter of Trump mismanaging the pandemic in a way that did, in fact, result in more deaths.) Similarly, his complaint that “Trump was wrong to say a vaccine was almost ready” ignores the fact that Trump crassly turned work on a vaccine into an election promise.
Graham then whined that Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld was fact-checked:
Then she added Fox News: “Much like last time, the former president has help from right-wing media.” A clip of The Five from June 13 followed. Greg Gutfeld said: “What is up the Dems’ sleeve to drag that body back into the White House?” Since Trump is considered likely to win at this point, “then what do you do after you win? How do you convince anyone that’s real? Have they even thought of that? Like, even the Dems behind the scenes better hope he doesn’t win, because no one’s going to believe it.”
She left out the part where Gutfeld called Biden a “feeble ghost.” They could fact-check the “ghost” part.
Graham didn’t mention that the MRC refuses to evaluate Gutfeld even as it regularly attacks other late-night hosts. One might say that PBS was doing a job that the MRC won’t. He whined further with a personal attack on a fact-checker:
To “fact check” this, PBS brought on David Becker of the “nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research. Becker worked for the leftist group People for The American Way. He always insists the 2020 election was the most wonderful, un-rigged election of all time. In addition, he co-wrote a book called The Big Truth with CBS reporter Major Garrett which imagined the outbreak of civil war in 2023. So let’s put aside the “nonpartisan” thing…and the “fact check” thing.
Barron-Lopez asked him to “debunk” Gutfeld, saying he warned of “shenanigans.” That came on June 14: “if you somehow pull this out with some kind of shenanigans, I hate to use that word so lightly, but shenanigans, you’re going to deal with the public who doesn’t buy the election.” Becker unloaded his spiel about how the 2024 election will be super-fair. He wasn’t asked about the “civil war in 2023” thing.
LBL then underlined how the right-wingers are historically awful: “That spreading of disinformation by Republican politicians, Americans across social media, and right-wing media, is it worse this election cycle than previous cycles?” Of course he said yes.
Graham doesn’t deny that his fellow right-wingers are spreading disinformation — only that it was called out. He concluded with, yes, more disinformation:
She also suggested “There’s another big election conspiracy theory being spread by Republicans right now.” That’s the claim that non-citizens are being registered to vote. Again, she cited a Fox News report that 49 states are providing voter registration forms to migrants at government offices without requiring proof of citizenship. Becker “debunked” this by claiming “We know that very, very few, if any noncitizens ever actually vote.”
Not only do very few noncitizens actually vote, it’s almost impossible to casually do so. First off, it’s already illegal; second, states do check voting rolls against other data to make sure people not eligible to vote do not. That makes it irrelevant whether “migrants” are given a form to fill out since it’s highly unlikely that a completed form will survive the vetting process. Graham, of course, is simply advancing dubious right-wing fearmongering about scary brown people.