Every four years, the Media Research Center’s coverage of the Republican National Convention is dominated by complaints that non-right-wing networks don’t give the RNC the fawning Fox News treatment, and this year was no different. Rich Noyes kicked things off with a July 14 “flashback” post on “what to expect” (from the MRC’s narrative, anyway) regarding RNC coverage:
The Trump campaign has announced that the 2024 Republican National Convention will begin as scheduled tomorrow, after the former President was injured in an attempted assassination. Saturday’s shooting will doubtless cast a shadow on the convention, but decades of past coverage suggests that the media coverage will nonetheless showcase journalists’ time-tested criticism of the GOP as an extremist, racist, sexist, mean-spirited mob that must be defeated at all costs.
Sarah Butler wrote in a July 15 post:
During their Monday night coverage of the Republican National Convention, CNN’s faux conservative commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin and liberal activist Van Jones shared their thoughts on how the convention was unfolding so far. Griffin attacked Republicans, per usual, while Jones insulted the African American men who spoke at the convention by suggesting their speeches were “cringey.”
[…]Jones chimed in that so far, the convention “was kind of cringey to me.” His reason was because “we got half an hour into 8:00. We had four African-American men. There’s clearly an agenda here.” But he was far from done with his rant as he continued:
JONES: There’s an opening to get black men because of the double-whammy of black men feeling the economic pain seriously and also feeling some social dislocation with when it comes to gender and feminism and what’s going on. There’s an opening there but this is not it. I’m going to tell you right now.
Further, Jones had some more rather offensive things to say in regards to the political leaders who were African American that spoke at the convention. According to him, they authentically black: “They -f all four of them sounded like black people who talk about black people, but don’t talk to black people. That’s how they sounded.”
Butler gushed that right-winger “Scott Jennings stepped in and put Griffin and Jones in their place as he defended the African American speakers. He started out by noting ‘Trump’s currently scoring in the 20’s” when it comes to polls concerning African Americans voting for Trump and “their featured tonight, whether you like him or not.'”
Jorge Bonilla whined that CNN’s Daniel Dale served as “Regime Media fact-debater” at the RNC:
After watching that “fact-check”, which is really little more than a debate monologue, I humbly ask you: has the rhetorical temperature been lowered to your satisfaction? It wasn’t that long ago that CNN’s own law enforcement analyst said that “media personalities need to tone it down”. Dale might be well served to follow that wise counsel.
Let’s face it: CNN lured Daniel Dale away from the Toronto Star, with promises of flat bacon and access to on-demand MRIs, for the sole purpose of fact-checking Republicans generally, and Donald Trump specifically. And it is broadly understood that the fact-checking industry is little more than a partisan hack operation performing comms and smearing the opposition.
In Dale’s case, he freely spits venom into the camera without citing sources. What is his baseline for saying “peace in the Middle East” is a lie? Did he search for new conflicts starting from 2017-2021? Did the signing of the Abraham Accords factor in? We don’t know.
Bonilla made no attempt to factually rebut any claim Dale made.
Alex Christy cheered Donald Trump Jr.’s temper tantrum against MSNBC on the convention floor, with a bonus lecture:
While delegates were being counted on Monday during the Republican National Convention, MSNBC sent Jacob Soboroff to the floor to interview Donald Trump Jr. about what his father’s second term would look during Katy Tur Reports. The pair battled over whether Trump was “divisive” before Trump Jr. ultimately told Soboroff to “get out of here” as he spread some fake news over immigration.
Soboroff wondered, “What is that change going to look like, Don? What, practically, your father as president, I think you would even say was a divisive figure, what’s it going to look like in a second term?”
Democracy is about arguments, debates, and disagreements. Every politician is divisive to some extent, including President Joe Biden. What makes democracy worth defending is that we can debate our differences like adults without shooting each other, which is why what happened on Saturday with the attempt on Donald Trump’s life is not just an attack on him, but on democracy.
As for Trump Jr., he replied, “I don’t think he was a divisive figure at all. I think the media created divisiveness around him. They lied about Russia-Russia collusion, they said he was a traitor, they went after him in every which way as possible. If the media actually starts being an honest broker, talking about the things he did, the prosperity he brought, the peace deals that he signed around the world, rather than the disaster we’re living right now, I think you’d do everyone in the country a big favor.”
When Soboroff asked about the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents, Trump Jr. sneered, to Christy’s approval: “It’s MSDNC, so I expect nothing less from you clowns, even today, even 48 hours later, you couldn’t wait. You couldn’t wait with your lies and with your nonsense, so just get out of here.”
Clay Waters spent a July 17 post complaining that PBS accurately described the convention’s tone:
Night Two of coverage of the Republican National Convention was “Make America Safe Once Again,” with politicians and ordinary Americans making speeches relaying stories about crime and the illegal immigration that causes some of that crime. PBS reporters and anchors sounded the alarm from the start, warning that Republicans are trying to instill unwarranted fear and anxiety in voters.
At 7:08 p.m. (ET), Lisa Desjardins, PBS’s sole reporter on the convention floor, warned viewers of the PBS News Hour, with a tone of dismissal and disapproval, to watch out for the Republicans setting a dark tone and spreading fear, and that smart journalists know better.
[…]David Brooks, a New York Times columnist that supposedly holds up the right on the PBS News Hour’s Friday evening political roundtable, didn’t exactly make a conservative defense, instead bashing conservative controversialist Tucker Carlson.
Waters glossed over the fact that Brooks was talking about Carlson because he was at the RNC (mentioned only in a transcript excerpt) and would later speak at the convention — and he said nothing about why Carlson is a “controversialist” (like his sucking up to Vladimir Putin, which the MRC was reluctant to criticize).
Waters also complained that PBS pointed out how Republicans use “the word ‘illegals’ to describe people the media now demand be called ‘undocumented immigrants.’ At 8:05 p.m. Capehart was aghast that speaker Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, used the term ‘illegals’ when talking about undocumented migrants.” Waters’ apparent approval of the dehumanizing “illegals” term runs counter to MRC policy regarding other words it considers dehumanizing, like “fetus.”