The Media Research Center did a lot of ref-working before the Trump-Harris debate and a lot of (non-right-wing) media-bashing afterwards. Tim Graham served up a hypocritical labeling complaint in his Sept. 11 column:
Even battle-hardened conservatives can find it shocking when Democrat-boosting reporters fail to identify Kamala Harris as a “liberal,” or a “progressive,” or even dare one say it, a “left-wing radical.”
In a new Media Research Center study of ABC’s World News Tonight since Harris was anointed in a back room as Biden’s replacement on July 21, Rich Noyes discovered ABC’s evening-news crew has never applied an ideological label to her. In Kamala’s first week as the nominee, CBS cited her “liberal voting record” and NBC reported she was a “self-described progressive prosecutor.”
But through September 4, ABC’s correspondents never called Harris either a “liberal” or a “progressive.” Instead, eight stories included clips of Republicans (usually Donald Trump) attacking Harris’s liberal record. The ABC team also never criticized Harris’s handling of top issues like painful inflation or illegal immigration.
One way that liberal journalists put a protective bubble around their candidate is to pretend she’s somehow above ideology. They only suggest that this is an attack coming from Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, and therefore it’s just negative advertising, not news.
[…]San Francisco-based reporter Marisa Lagos began: “Trump didn’t mince words at the Economic Club of New York last week, making false claims about Harris and her record.” Trump called her a “Marxist” who nearly destroyed San Francisco. But nowhere in this story is there a “liberal,” or ”progressive,” or “radical.”
But there are two references to “conservative media”!
We’ve documented how the MRC loves to indiscriminately label everything that’s only slightly less conservative than it as “left-wing,” and rarely labels its fellow right-wingers with an accurate moniker, so he’s clearly showing a double standard.
Curtis Houck returned to his employer-mandated work-the-refs narrative that the debate’s ABC moderators were irredeemably biased ans whined it was pointed out that Trump got owned by Harris:
Following what can safely be placed at the top of the worst presidential debates ever given the election interference by ABC News’s questioning and open liberal partisanship by moderators Linsey David and David Muir, Wednesday’s Good Morning America was bursting at the seams over Vice President Harris “confron[ting] Donald Trump” (along with Muir and Davis) and putting him “on defense” throughout the “fierce and fiery face-off.”
In other words, we told you so about Muir and ABC.
“Breaking overnight, their first debate. Kamala Harris confronts Donald Trump. Breaking overnight, the vice president and former president meet for the first time at the ABC News presidential debate,” co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos announced in a tease.
After co-host Michael Strahan led off by touting Harris shaking Trump’s hand, Stephanopoulos gushed this was her “clearly signaling there that she wanted to take command, kicking off 90 minutes of confrontation” that had “Trump on defense for most of the night” and claimed polls overwhelmingly call Harris the winner.
[…]Bruce also complained Trump was the one who “[got] personal” (although Harris, among other lines, brought up claims of sexual misconduct against Trump) and forced to discuss “statements questioning Harris’ racial identity”.
On the argument between Trump and Muir about 2020, Bruce waved the proverbial pom-poms to boast “Harris us[ed] the moment to call Trump unqualified.”
Houck didn’t dispute anything Muir said.
It took both Tom Olohan and Gabriela Pariseau to complain that “ABC hosts and debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis asked at least 27 questions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris but not a single one touched on freedom of speech or censorship.” As we’ve noted, the MRC considers correcting lies and misinformation to be “censorship.”
MRC chief Brent Bozell took his whining about the debate to a right-wing radio show:
On Wednesday, MRC founder and president L. Brent Bozell appeared on WMAL’s O’Connor and Company to break down ABC’s awful debate moderator performance put in by anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis.
Bozell told the O’Connor and Company’s Julie Gunlock and Andrew Langer that the hatchet job by the moderators was expected: “Speaking for the Media Research Center — we weren’t in the slightest bit surprised at what happened last night.” Bozell added that Trump has “Gone through it with every network but ABC has clearly been the worst all along.”
Bozell didn’t pull any punches as he blasted: “Let me tell you something, whoever it was on the Trump campaign who selected ABC should be fired this morning….The President said last night ‘You should fire incompetent staff,’ this was an incompetent staff.”
[…]Bozell continued: “ABC gave her 100 percent positive news. At the same time, when Donald Trump is gaining in the polls, when Donald Trump has a magnificent convention. When Donald Trump — damn it — is shot in the head 93 percent negative coverage. And someone said “Let’s do an interview on — let’s do, let’s do a debate on ABC because it’s going to be fair.”
The anonymous writer of this post failed to label O’Connor as a right-winger, further proving the MRC’s hypocrisy on labeling.
Nicholas Fondacaro applied his employer-mandated narrative to his daily hate-watch of “The View”:
The Cackling Coven of ABC’s The View was extremely happy with the way their network’s 3-on-1 presidential debate turned out the previous night. According to their oh-so-insightful analysis, Vice President Harris doomed former President Trump just by initiating a handshake as they walked on stage. But even an anti-Trumper, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tapped the brakes on their hot take.
The liberal ladies were already several minutes into their gushing when moderator Whoopi Goldberg asked if they wanted to see her recreation of walkout and handshake. “I need to see it!” proclaimed faux conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” agreed pretend independent Sara Haines. “The walk out was the best!” added staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners).
[…]Goldberg added: “Because she said to him, ‘you want to say something to me, say it to my face!’ And she put her face right there and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it.”
Fondacaro never disputed the accuracy of the hosts’ views, and Hostin’s lawyers are certainly happy he provided yet another example of his maliciously false smears of her to use in her eventual defamation lawsuit against him.
Graham returned to whine further about the debate outcome in his Sept. 11 podcast:
Wow! ABC’s presidential debate was remarkably skewed. Donald Trump drew specific hardball questions. Kamala Harris drew vague, open-ended softballs. Trump was “fact checked” six times. Harris never was. When you think the point of being a professional journalist is to Destroy Trump, of course you’re going to be proud of this debate moderation.
Senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino joins the show to underline how ABC defines “professionalism.” We wanted to apologize for saying in pre-debate interviews that maybe ABC would be like Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were on CNN for the Trump-Biden debate in June.
The worst part was asking Harris “questions” that sounded like “your turn. Go.” Harris clearly had pre-rehearsed answers. So vague questions made it easier to dodge and launch into the boilerplate. On Afghanistan, they asked “do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?
After challenging Trump about his insults at a National Association of Black Journalists event about Harris “deciding to be black,” then they simply asked her “your thoughts on this?” We wanted Trump to point to the moderators and say to Harris, “why are you afraid of an interview with these two Democrats?”
Of course, CNN’s Daniel Dale asserted that Trump had lied about 33 times during the debate, and Harris had maybe one. She was “overwhelmingly factual.” This is the PolitiFact tilt on CNN. Going into the debate, PolitiFact dumped 199 “Pants on Fire” articles on Trump. Harris has zero. She was elected Attorney General of California in 2011, but it’s zero over the last 13 years.
Jeffrey Lord also spouted the mandated right-wing narrative in his Sept. 14 column:
It wasn’t a hard call.
At this point in the history of televised debates, a history that began with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates ( 64 years ago!!) and has continued on with a seemingly endless stream of both Republican vs. Democrat nominee debates plus Republican vs. Republican and Democrat vs. Democrat nomination debates, one would think ABC would have learned a thing or two.
But, alas, no.
The result of the much ballyhooed ABC Trump vs. Harris debate was, well aside from the verdict on the candidates themselves, a bursting of the liberal media bubble.
[…]With that history behind them, how could this 2024 Trump-Harris presidential debate result in such a blizzard of criticism? Criticism targeted at both the network itself and the debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis?
The answer is not hard to figure out if outside the bubble that is the liberal media.
The answer is that as the two moderators, their staff and network executives prepped for the debate, any sign of anti-Trump bias and pro-Harris bias was simply not recognized. Why? Because the moderators, staff and network executives themselves all operate in a liberal media bubble where anti-Trump bias is not seen as bias. Any criticism of Harris is seen as out of bounds – racist, sexist yada yada yada.
With that being the case, Muir and Davis were headed for a sure-thing media car wreck – because the country as a whole is not living and working 24/7 in the liberal media bubble. So when the two drilled in on Trump – but would not treat Harris in the same relentless critical fashion – millions of Americans noticed.
Unfortunately for Lord, he’s trapped in the right-wing media bubble and thinks anything that doesn’t advance his preferred narratives is “liberal.”
Meanwhile, Larry Elder stuck so slavishly to the mandated narrative in his Sept. 15 column that he parroted the MRC, touting how “the conservative Media Research Center accused ABC of having the most biased of the three big networks’ nightly news programs.” He didn’t mention, of course, that the MRC’s research is biased and shoddy — doing that would violate the mandate, after all.
Missing from all of these posts, though, is any acknowledgement that Trump did poorly in the debate. MRC employees are not allowed to disparage their god, after all.