Just as it did before the presidential debate, the Media Research Center kicked off its coverage of the vice presidential debate with a round of ref-working. Geoffrey Dickens kicked it off in a Sept. 26 post:
CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan are set to moderate Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate but if their recent reporting is an indicator, viewers should expect a one-sided attack from the CBS Evening News anchor and the Face the Nation moderator.
After the first attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, O’Donnell actually wondered if he was partially to blame as she pressed Rep. Kevin McCarthy on did Trump “bear responsibility” for the “hotter” political temperature and does he need to “change his rhetoric?”
As Trump was recovering from the first shooting, Brennan scolded: “This was a traumatic event no doubt for him, but I did notice there was no call for lowering the temperature, condemning all political violence” on Trump’s social media account.
If those two could be so callous to Trump after that heinous moment, what chance does his JD Vance have in getting fair treatment in Tuesday’s debate against Tim Walz?
Dickens didn’t explain why Trump deserves a free pass for his inciting rhetoric. Instead, he followed with “just a few of the most obnoxious left-wing or anti-conservative outbursts from O’Donnell and Brennan via the MRC’s archives.”
The next day, Alex Christy served up a biased list of “27 additional questions CBS’s Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell should ask Walz as well as three questions they should ask Vance.” Yes, Christy actually had questions for Vance — but they also leaned into right-wing narratives like the Walz questions did. Two were softballs setting up campaign narratives about capitalism and Ukraine, though the third was unusually critical: “Unlike the Republican party’s platform in 2016, the text does not include backing for a 20-week federal limit on abortions. Why would you and Donald Trump offer less protection to unborn children than before?”
Rich Noyes served up his particular dishonest bit of ref-working in a Sept. 30 post:
Tomorrow night, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan will moderate the 2024 vice presidential debate between Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance. Much as we found prior to the presidential debate on ABC three weeks ago, our analysis of CBS’s campaign coverage suggests the event will likely be a friendly venue for the Democratic nominee, and far more hostile to the Republican.
During the two months from July 21 (when President Biden left the race) through September 27, our analysts reviewed all 346 minutes of campaign coverage (161 stories) on the CBS Evening News and its Saturday/Sunday twin, the CBS Weekend News. We found that coverage of Vice President Kamala Harris has been extremely positive (84%), while coverage of former President Donald Trump has been lopsidedly negative (79%). (See Methodology explanation at the end of this post.)
While there was far less discussion of the vice presidential candidates, we found the same wild imbalance: 89% positive coverage for the Democrat Walz, vs. 89% negative coverage for the Republican Vance. Add it all up, and coverage of the Democratic ticket on the CBS Evening News was 85% positive, vs. 81% negative for the Republicans.
As we’ve pointed out every time Noyes does one of these, his “study” is dishonest and slanted because it pretends neutral coverage doesn’t exist, which artificially and dishonestly inflates his numbers in order to serve up right-wing clickbait.
Later that day, Tim Graham took a victory lap of sorts by cheering that the moderators can’t fact-check the candidates:
Associated Press media reporter David Bauder reported on Friday that CBS News “says it will be up to the politicians — not the moderators — to check the facts of their opponents.” That would be a shocking contrast to ABC.
[…]Here’s one big reason to distrust “independent fact-checkers” like PolitiFact during and after Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate. Like their fellow Democrats, they’re going to tilt against Vance as the obvious mangler of facts, and unload their ‘fact checking” on him.
Gov. Tim Walz was elected to the House in 2006, and never drew a PolitiFact check until August 7, 2024, after Harris picked Walz as her running mate. In six fact checks, he was ruled as “True” once, “Half True” twice, and “Mostly False” or “False” three times.
None of those were about fact-mangling his own biography. They fact-checked Vance on Walz’s lies. They also fact-checked Vance for getting Walz’s record wrong on “gender-affirming care.”
J.D. Vance was first fact-checked on February 20, 2018, before he ran for anything. Overall now, he has one “True” (the first check), one “Mostly True,” two “Half True,” and 16 on the False side, including three “Pants On Fire” rulings.
So that’s six checks for Walz, three on the False side (50 percent), and 20 checks for Vance, 16 on the False side (80 percent). Or just note the False checks are 16 to 3.The “Pants on Fire” count is 3-zip.
Remember, the MRC thinks that mere fact-checking is “censorship,” even though Graham made no effort to dispute any of the fact-checks about Vance. He’s just mad Vance was fact-checked at all because he believes conservative should be allowed to spread lies without repercussions.
Dickens returned with a more wide-ranging ref-working in an Oct. 1 post:
Tonight’s VP debate, between GOP nominee J.D. Vance and Democratic nominee Tim Walz comes on the heels of a months-long media assault on Vance contrasted with a friendly sales-pitch of Walz.
The contrast couldn’t be more stark in how the two were greeted into the 2024 race.
Walz has been sold to the American public as a “moderate” “folksy” “football coach” with “rural roots.”
On the other hand, Vance has been depicted as a “weird” and “dangerous” anti-women candidate who “believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity.” The media even judo-flipped Vance’s criticism of Walz’s “stolen valor” story by actually questioning his service, instead.
The following are the most egregious examples of leftist journalists and celebrities eviscerating Vance while whipping up excitement for Walz since the two VP candidates were nominated:
Note that Dickens couldn’t be bothered to document the anti-Walz bias on Fox News and other right-wing channels. Just before the debate, Nicholas Fondacaro lashed out at a commentator who dared to criticize Vance:
How worried were Democrats that Ohio Senator J.D. Vance (R) was going to mop the floor with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) in the vice presidential debate Tuesday night? Well, in the run up to the event, CNN’s Democrats were seriously arguing that a Vance win would actually be a bad thing because he would come off as “predatory,” while Walz would be “constrained by his desire to be a unifier.”
Former Obama adviser turned CNN talking head, David Axelrod admitted that former President Trump picked Vance to be his “designated hitter” and that Vance was good a moments like this. “Donald Trump is a casting director, and he was convinced he would be good on TV for him, and this debate is obviously the most important television appearance there is,” he said.
But according to Axelrod, Vance would come off looking “predatory” like a vicious coyote ripping at an innocent Labrador:
[…]Far-left political activist Van Jones warned that “J.D. Vance is dangerous to debate” because he’s a “phony” person:
Look, I think J.D. Vance is dangerous to debate. First of all, you don’t know which J.D. Vance you’re going to get. He’s such a phony that he could either be the phony Appalachia guy or he could be the kind of suck up that he was to get a job with Donald Trump.
Of course, he omitted that Walz has been credibly accused of stolen valor for lying about going off to war while he abandoned his unit before they deployed.
The whole “stolen valor” thing is just misleading right-wing talking points the MRC is obligated to parrot as a member of the Trump Regime Media.
After the debate, the MRC cranked out more of its obligatory pro-Vance, anti-media spin. More on that soon.